Combining Business and Entrepreneurship Mindsets to Advise Companies on the Rise
What does $20 million get you these days?
That’s the big question LeBow undergraduates confronted during fall term under the guidance of clinical professor of entrepreneurship and Close School of Entrepreneurship associate director of external relations Robert Morier.
In Venture-Backed Commercialization, one of a suite of venture-focused courses offered by Close, Morier’s students advise a mid-stage company at a critical juncture; in the most recent offering, their client company had recently received $20 million in funding.
Where do they go from here? In seeking an answer, students worked closely with the company’s CFO and other C-suite leaders, carefully scrutinizing their financials and their plans for new product offerings with an eye toward the company’s future.
Business and Entrepreneurship in Tandem
With the integration of the Close School of Entrepreneurship within the LeBow College of Business at the start of the 2025-26 academic year, both institutions are benefiting from the melding of skillsets and perspectives and the synergies between entrepreneurship and business.
Morier notes there was a higher headcount for this special topics course, as well as a higher proportion of business students.
“I find that business students bring in the theoretical side of things from previous courses and case studies, and they ask really insightful questions,” Morier says.
“In this course, you aren’t working on a case — it’s very real, and the money is real — and students are advising the company as analysts, consultants or accountants.”
Creating a Venture-Capital Ecosystem
Venture-Backed Capitalization builds on another frequently offered entrepreneurship course, Venture Capital Due Diligence, with students advising a broad portfolio of earlier-stage companies and providing feedback as those companies seek initial funding.
Jesse Herman, a third-year finance major, appreciated the opportunity to build on the earlier Due Diligence course and to apply skills from consulting projects with the Drexel Consulting Group, a student organization he’s been involved with since his first year and which he now leads as co-president.
“Being around the company’s CFO and others who have such high-level jobs and great previous experience, you realize they’re such a wealth of knowledge and that they think very differently.”
Sopanha Chea, a fifth-year entrepreneurship and innovation major with a minor in marketing, has taken classes in both Close and LeBow throughout his studies, with much of his final year being devoted to completing his minor.
“Professor Morier prepared us well for this by treating the classroom like an office and really emphasizing communication and sharing your thoughts and perspectives,” he says. “Now we see that everything we’ve learned in class applies to companies in real life.”
Learning for Both Leaders and Students
Morier notes that the C-suite leadership for this recent client company has extensive experience, with backgrounds in a range of different industries.
“The reality is, when each of us starts a new job, we don’t already know how to do it,” Morier says. “We start, we bring in our past experience and we build our job. It’s the same with starting a company.”
He compares the company and its luxury product offerings to a high-end sportscar.
“None of them have ever built a car like that before,” he says. “What the students get to see is a bunch of smart, talented people working to figure it out.”
