The course provides a thorough understanding on financial decision-making faced by entrepreneurial firms (SME's and start-ups) over their life cycle.

Choosing how to finance an entrepreneurial venture raises many questions. The first question the course addresses relates to valuation. Can young companies and start-ups be valued with the same tools as established firms? The second question the course addresses relates to the sources of financing. What possible sources of financing are available to entrepreneurial firms, depending on their current life cycle stage? Under what conditions can financial funds be obtained? How can a firm signal its trustworthiness to potential investors in an environment characterized by high levels of asymmetric information? Financial sources covered in the materials include among others relationship lending, crowdfunding, angel investing, and venture capital investment. The course discusses the stance of current academic research on these topics via research articles that present important and relevant empirical results for practitioners, policy makers, and of course the firms themselves.

Journal articles and case studies

The course materials and related workload are demanding. Students that have no background in finance are strongly advised to study the basic concepts beforehand. Basic finance concepts such as net present value, internal rate of return, CAPM, agency theory and moral hazard are assumed to be known at the level of Berk and Demarzo (2016).