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The number of new startups launched in the US each year is quickly increasing and many successful ones have been founded by recent CS graduates. Current and future students may be wondering how they too can succeed with a startup of their own. Brown CS has this in mind with csciStartup, a new course offered this Spring 2016. The course, taught by Adjunct Assistant Professor John Jannotti, aims to help students overcome the mechanical hurdles of creating a startup and teach them the keys to designing products people want.

John says he is very humbled to be teaching the course. “There are a ton of different aspects that go into running a business that I don’t know everything about,” he says. That’s why he intends to break the course up into two different meetings per week: one where he can help teams directly with their products, and another where experts in different areas give guest lectures.

“csciStartup is different from any other course at Brown because it is very product focused as opposed to just how to build a business,” says John. “The goal is for each team to have a product ready to hit the ground running by halfway through the semester.”

Brown alum Evan Stites-Clayton thinks csciStartup will be really beneficial to students interested in starting a company of their own. Evan is the founder of the successful startup, Teespring, which makes designing and selling apparel easy. He says he would have enjoyed having the option to take a class like csciStartup while at Brown. “It would have been nice to have a community of other people working on startups and to have the ability to share resources and get advice from experts.”

For more information about this course go to http://cs.brown.edu/~jj/startup.html.