JEFFREY ESCHBACH is an investor, entrepreneur, and professor with over 20 years of experience developing new businesses.
As a founder and CEO, he built and successfully exited Page Vault Inc., an award-winning tech company that transforms Internet content into evidence for legal cases. Page Vault is listed as an Inc. 5000 company and serves a majority of the Am Law 200 as customers.
Jeffrey also co-founded Chicago Early Growth Ventures, an investor network which targets early-stage deals across the country. In addition to financial returns, the group also seeks to develop the pool of active investors in the Chicago ecosystem by educating and introducing members to vetted deal opportunities. Over the past six years, the group has invested in more than 95 portfolio companies and attracted over 300 members.
Before entering the startup world, Jeffrey built a career leading tech R&D initiatives within international corporations including Intel Japan and Motorola Research Labs. He directed novel tech ideas through the full product development life cycle, guiding proposals from concept-phase to fully deployed solutions. His leadership positions have spanned technical R&D, product management, and corporate strategy, with assignments across Asia, Latin America, and the US.
He is also a National Science Foundation Fellow and has earned 11 USPTO patents related to cloud computing for novel business applications. Jeffrey’s work has driven real-world innovations in the areas of context-aware communications, virtual and augmented reality platforms, and mission-critical wireless networks.
Within academia, Jeffrey is as a Clinical Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship within the Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches on startup fundamentals and early-stage investing. He also serves as the Kellogg Entrepreneurship Program Outreach Lead, mentoring students in the Executive/EMBA and Evening & Weekend programs with their new ventures. Jeffrey earned both his BS with distinction and MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. He later received his MBA with highest honors from the Kellogg School of Management.
Industry AI Capstone Project
This course is available only to students in the MBAI Program
New Venture Discovery is designed to help students navigate the earliest stages of starting a new venture beginning with the identification of a problem in the market that is worth solving. The class teaches students tools and techniques to translate these problems into viable business concepts, with an emphasis on enabling an aspiring entrepreneur to get as far as possible, with as little as possible, as FAST as possible.
Student teams begin the quarter with nothing more than a series of hypotheses about a new venture, then design and execute a series of in-market experiments that either validate these assumptions, or force them to iterate aspects of their business model in real time. The objective of the course to guide students toward the achievement of "product-market fit" as a crucial first step in in the creation of a startup. From here, students can evolve their businesses by enrolling in the "Develop" and "Launch" courses that serve as the continuation of the new ventures curriculum.
New Venture Discovery course material ranges from customer discovery and design thinking, to rapid prototyping (of both offers and business models), bootstrapping methods and communicating/selling the vision for a new venture. The course format is a blend of lecture, fieldwork, cross-team collaboration and ideation sessions, outside speakers and expert mentoring.
**This course may not be dropped after the second week of the quarter**
