New Venture Strategy at Booth: why the 'Class of No' is the right format for learning judgment
Jeremie Bacon runs a course with no written notes, no PowerPoint, and no case write-ups. It sounds like a gimmick. It is not.
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Jeremie Bacon calls New Venture Strategy the "Class of No." No written case solutions. No written lecture notes. No PowerPoint slides. The class runs entirely on spoken discussion — Socratic, fast, and unforgiving of vague answers.
When I heard this before enrolling, I thought it was a pedagogical affectation. By the second session, I had changed my mind.
The format is not arbitrary. It is specifically designed to develop the one thing you cannot learn by reading: real-time judgment under uncertainty.
Entrepreneurship is almost entirely oral. You pitch to investors who interrupt you. You negotiate with partners who have competing interests. You make calls in the room, not after the meeting. You have to be able to reason out loud without the crutch of a prepared answer.
Written cases and polished decks let you simulate thinking without actually doing it. You can look like you are reasoning when you are really pattern-matching to a template. Bacon removes the template. What remains is either judgment or the absence of it.
The content itself is dense. The course covers the essential dilemma of new ventures: every early decision has path dependencies that close off options you will want later. Executives manage within known constraints. Entrepreneurs have to create the constraints and the strategy simultaneously.
That distinction sounds obvious when you state it plainly. It is not obvious when you are in the middle of a case discussion and someone is asking you whether the company in front of you should pivot or stay the course. The frameworks that work for managing existing businesses actively mislead when applied to new ventures. Understanding why — precisely, not just intuitively — is most of what the course teaches.
The cases covered territory from early-stage financing dilemmas to founder-market fit to the moment when a promising idea becomes a liability. Cases like Heather Evans and Hotel Vertu pushed on questions about when conviction is a strength and when it is the reason a company fails. The cases are chosen to make you uncomfortable with simple answers.
What stayed with me from Bacon's reading list was his framework for expertise and intuition. The sessions on when expert intuition is reliable versus when it is dangerous — drawing on work by Kahneman and Klein — were some of the most practically useful things I encountered in the first quarter. The answer is not "trust your gut" or "ignore your gut." It is: intuition is reliable when you have been trained in an environment that gives fast and accurate feedback. Entrepreneurship often does not provide that. The feedback loop is long and noisy. Overconfidence in pattern recognition from prior experience is one of the most consistent ways founders get into trouble.
That insight sharpened how I think about my own judgment. When I feel confident about a product decision, the right question is not "am I confident?" It is "what kind of feedback have I actually received in situations like this one, and how quickly did reality correct me when I was wrong?"
The course is hard to summarize because the point was never the content. The point was the practice of reasoning in public, getting called out when the reasoning was fuzzy, and building the capacity to think sharply when it costs something. I do not think you can learn that from slides.