CDL-Seattle

We are pleased to announce the Creative Destruction Lab, a new experiential entrepreneurship course focused on helping build massively scalable, seed-stage, science-based companies. Watch the CDL video and see why you want to be involved.

The class at CDL-Seattle ENTRE 579/490 is open to 2nd-year MBAs, PhD students, select graduate students and advanced undergraduates. The year-long course follows 4 full-day CDL sessions where 20 high-potential startups are led through an objective-setting mentoring process by a stellar group of mentors from Seattle and beyond. Students will attend these sessions, and then work with a matched startup between sessions to complete the objectives set by mentors; this may include customer interviews, analyzing industry structure, and developing fundraising materials.

The class will begin on October 19th. See below for the syllabus. In the Fall there will be five class sessions focused on entrepreneurial strategy and competing in science-based industries. See below for dates and times of the class sessions. Students will attend 4 all-day CDL sessions on Nov 5th, Jan 28th, April 1st and May 20th, where companies and mentors meet to set, debate and review objectives. Students will be paired with a venture after the first CDL session on Nov 5th to work on early-stage market analysis and selection. (Note that most of the course work itself will be in the Spring and Winter quarters of 2022, with the five Fall 2021 classes providing a foundation of core frameworks.)

The course is a key component of the Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle (CDL-Seattle), an objectives-based accelerator being launched at the Foster School in Fall 2021 and with support from UW, Microsoft, the Allen Institute, and leading Seattle entrepreneurs and investors. The focus of CDL-Seattle is computational health. The field exists at the interface of machine learning, health informatics, computational modeling, and biomedical signal processing. Our thesis is that computational health is at an inflection point, and Seattle and UW are poised to be leading hubs in building massive-scale, computational-health companies. The course provides a novel opportunity to engage with this industry and these companies in their earliest years.

The course should be of high interest to students interested in entrepreneurship, technology strategy, consulting, and the intersection of computing and health. Faculty for the course are Ben Hallen and Teddy Johnson, who bring together experience as entrepreneurs, executives, and researchers.

A note on the course structure and enrollment: CDL is an experiential-based course and has an atypical schedule. Enrollment is via competitive applications, which will be evaluated holistically. Applications are due October 3rd at 11:59pm. Given the atypical nature of the course, students will officially enroll for 4 credits in Winter Quarter 2022 and 2 credits in Spring 2022 (with instructor permission, this may be alternatively structured as 2 credits in Winter and 4 in Spring). Course activities, however, will begin October 2021.