Mesa’s 1-Year Builder’s Curriculum

In today's digital age, data and the digital footprint it leaves are everywhere. The ability to use it effectively for evidence-backed decisions can truly set you apart.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Identify relevant data to solve problems, extract and analyze datasets, and generate actionable insights
• Effectively communicate insights through clear visualizations and a compelling narrative
• Align business decisions, experiments, or hypotheses with data-driven insights for impactful outcomes.

Learn tools like Excel, Powerquery, SQL, Python and PowerBI

Work on 25+ real-world startup datasets and get your hands dirty

Get regular 1:1 mentorship, support and practice

One of Amazon's key leadership principles is deeply understanding your customer—their pain points, motivations, and alternatives—as the foundation for building effective solutions.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Define and communicate clear customer personas for a product or service
• Conduct thorough user research, interpret insights, and understand customer messaging
• Use frameworks like JTBD (Job-To-Be-Done), User Stories, and User Quotes to define user requirements

Learn marketing and user research from top professors

Interact with real customers while building a business

Conduct customer discovery with early-stage startups.

Effective communication with team members, senior leadership, and external stakeholders is the most important predictor of career growth—especially as automation increases. This skill will serve you for life.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Confidently represent yourself and your ideas with clear and concise articulation
• Write compelling, brief and purpose driven documents
• Influence without authority at the workplace

Learn the art of business storytelling, negotiations and presentations

Gain 50+ public speaking opportunities and present ideas to top startup leaders

Receive 1:1 coaching on executive presence and crafting your elevator pitch

As Elon Musk says, this is "the only thing worth mastering." Understanding problems at their core, identifying key components, and building solutions is vital in startups' ambiguous environments.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Deeply understand and communicate core problems
• Break down problems using frameworks like MECE and 80/20
• Identify key problem-solving levers and prioritize efforts on identified issues

Analyze & break 100+ real startup business cases

Access 50+ hours of workshops on structured problem-solving with examples

Join bi-monthly moderated group discussions on trending business topics

"What will it really take for this business to be successful?" is a nuanced question, the answer to which lies at the intersection of core business domains like marketing, finance, operations, accounting and strategy. The ability to answer this single question goes a long way.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Grasp and apply essential business frameworks and concepts
• Understand core business models, metrics, and flywheels
• Analyze revenue, cost, LTV, CAC and other levers that move the needle

Attend 500+ hours of lectures by top B-school professors

Work on live startup projects with leadership on real-world business challenges

Solve 100+ renowned business cases in teams of 3-4

To succeed in high-growth startups, the key is to launch fast, fail fast; listen to customers, and continuously iterate on your product. This agile approach contrasts with traditional methods but is fundamental to the success of every major tech startup.

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Define hypotheses, launch experiments, and build solutions based on customer needs
• Develop a Minimum Viable Product and craft a GTM strategy to secure your first 100 customers.
• Create clear success metrics, track them and iterate solutions based on feedback

Attend 40+ hours of Product Management coursework

Launch real products and go to market with "Mesa Startup Lab"

Gain an Agile scrum certification

At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:

• Understand the process of selling in both B2C & B2B contexts
• Work backwards from an audience and product to create an efficient sales funnel
• Create a sales strategy for acquiring the first 100 customers for any product/service

Undergo 40+ hours of sales coursework

Get real exposure to selling via 1-day sales challenges with popular brands

Make upwards of 5L in revenue via the dropshipping challenge in Term 1

The ability to plan, execute and monitor a process is often overlooked. It is a key muscle to build if you want to be indispensable at the workplace. Startups look for doers, folks who can own something end to end and deliver end outcomes without requiring hand holding.

At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:

• Understand what goes behind setting up business processes from scratch
• Deconstruct a customer journey funnel, conversion metrics and interventions required at every stage
• Build comprehensive trackers, define micro success metrics and create task distributions

25+ hours of workshops on program managing processes

Internships at startups where you get to own a process end-to-end

Manage business processes for your small business in term 1

Understanding how a sector works, business models within it, needle movers for increasing revenues and decreasing costs are vital when wanting to enter the startup ecosystem as a founder or as a startup leader.

At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:

• Understand key business drivers and levers in a sector
• Understand a few dominant business models existing in a sector
• Deconstruct what it will take for a startup to be successful in a particular sector

Deep dives in a workshop format with a sector expert

Learn to write a sector thesis with top VC partners

Sector specific student driven business clubs

Artificial Intelligence and its applications are completely disrupting the way we work and solve problems. It's absolutely essential that you stay on top of emerging technologies and understand the core concepts that run them.

At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:

• Understand core building blocks of the technology
• Deconstruct examples of use cases where the technology has been deployed
• Build and launch prototypes of micro-SaaS products

Build a Gen AI product at the Mesa AI Lab

Expose yourself to the world of AI via day-long hackathons

Network with top AI experts from India's startup ecosystem