Everything that we do in our courses is highly experiential — it’s the only way to begin to appreciate the demands that entrepreneurship places on teams and individuals. Additionally, the best startup teams embrace disciplinary diversity so we encourage all students from across UofT to participate. This is why we offer two of the most highly rated courses in parallel. A customer development course, the Business of Software (CSC454/2527 – that all of you will take), which informs the product development Capstone Design course (CSC491/2600 — that a subset of you will take). The former course (customer development) requires no previous computer science or business background, just an insatiable curiosity for entrepreneurship.
Customer development teaches you how to engage prospective customers in order to validate the hypotheses you will make regarding your customer’s personas, their hair-burning issues and your value proposition to them. The knowledge gathered there directly feeds into a calculated product development cycle to rapidly iterate toward product-market-fit and minimize the go-to-market timeline. This all needs to underpin an investable, self-sustaining and ever growing business model.
The second way we create a true-to-life experience is by sourcing industry problems. That means we go out and seek industry partners that provide problem sets for our students to solve during the semester. Problems that are really challenging their businesses. No make-believe issues or theoretical hallucinations but the problems that are costing them financially or reputation every single day! We’ve done this before with subjects such as law, biomed/biotech and human performance enhancement.
We are partnering with Dandelion Networks, a startup in block chain and cryptography in Toronto. The theme for this term will be to build a startup using/around blockchain technologies (excluding exchanges, portfolios, or anything to do with transfers). Blockchain is most well known for its use in cryptocurrency, though there are a number of other avenues to use it. Examples include immutable ledger-based information systems, privacy related ventures, and compliance and regulatory environments, and more. There also exist problems that need to be solved around efficiency and environmental impact. Join DCSIL and Dandelion networks, a highly scalable startup in the blockchain space, in winter 2022 to work on this exciting opportunity!
Dandelion Networks is a company built around Blockchain technology. While they can help in most areas related to Blockchain, they are highly knowledgable in Cryptographic signature systems. We’d recommend taking an extra look at startups and problems in that space. Cryptographic signature systems are central to providing validation and security in modern networks, but the signatures require a huge amount of work from computers. Dandelion is working on ground-breaking algorithms, such as the Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) cryptosystem, which work to solve this problem. These algorithms, while breakthrough, have not solved the problem for a variety of reasons. How can we bridge those gaps and provide a commercially viable solution in the cryptographic space when it comes to costs and sustainability?