The room
A term is five sessions — one afternoon a month, 2:30 to 6:30. That’s the whole footprint. Here is an entire session, minute by minute; there is dinner in the middle of it.
Q&A comes after you’ve built the thing, not after the talk. Students don’t have questions after a talk. They have questions after they’ve tried it and failed at it.
The schedule is a recommended framework rather than a rigid agenda — segments flex to fit the speaker, the activity, and the room.
Once a month is the design, not a limitation. DBI wants athletes, musicians, actors, volunteers — students with full lives. The institute is built to support the rest of your life, not replace it. Play your season. Do the musical. Keep your job.
Don’t mistake the cadence for casualness. Inside those four hours you build, defend, and get judged, and the homework between sessions is graded on your reasoning, not your guesses. Small footprint. Full weight.
Your team runs a five-location boba chain. Ten investment chips, twelve things you could spend them on. Pick exactly three. Then name two things you are choosing to be bad at, and defend it to a hostile board member who asks one question: “What did you give up, and why was that okay?”
Teams who say they didn’t really give up anything score zero.
Your team is an assembly line. Tortillas are paper circles, rice is white strips, salsa is green dots. A QC inspector rejects anything off-spec. Run it once badly, find your bottleneck, redesign it, run it again.
Then ownership changes the spec mid-run. That’s inventory risk, and nobody forgets it.
Every speaker is required to spend two minutes on what they literally did last Monday morning. Concrete. Not the LinkedIn version.
It is the single most valuable two minutes of any session.
The pathway
In the fall you learn every part of how a business runs, then fix a real company’s problem. In the spring — if you make the cut — you build your own, as a founder. Here is the whole year, top to bottom.
August
Online application, then interviews — around 200 apply for 40 seats. No business background required: selection weighs curiosity, follow-through, communication and coachability, not who your family knows.
September — December · Term one · Intro to Business
You are a generalist.
Five sessions, one afternoon a month — each one a different lens on how a business actually runs, taught by people who do it for a living. Mid-semester, case teams form and get mentors; every session after that ends with your team applying the lens to the case.
Session 01
Using data and technology to make better business decisions.
Read the three financial statements, price a product, find breakeven — then learn where AI actually earns its keep in a business. The session ends analyzing a struggling company using both.
Session 02
Building a business that can grow and execute.
What makes an advantage survivable — moats, positioning, choosing your market — and then the unglamorous machinery that keeps promises: supply chains, bottlenecks, quality. Teams redesign a real company’s operations.
Session 03
Building relationships with customers and teams.
Branding, personas, and funnels — why everything a company posts is aimed at someone. Selling as diagnosis, not persuasion. And the hires and culture calls that quietly decide everything else.
Session 04
Say it like someone who owns the answer.
Structure an argument, build the deck, deliver it standing up — and survive the questions that come after. It’s the rehearsal for what comes next: session five isn’t a class at all.
December · The term-one capstone
A real company hands you a problem it actually has, and you defend a recommendation to the people who own it — on stage. In 2025 Surfline brought the brief: “Where would you expand — Indonesia, South Africa, or Brazil?” Eight teams of five worked it like a real engagement: research, strategy, numbers. You do not own this business. You are advising it.
The winning team · Group 6
Genevieve Phung · Drew Dawson · Hayden Wheeler · Poppy Namazy · Pierce Millar
Their answer: Indonesia — not a market to enter, an ecosystem to build. An AI trip-planning engine they called WAVES, a GPS “smart leash” engineered for reef breaks at a 41% hardware margin, and a coaching subscription on top — three revenue streams and a $16.5 million year-one model, defended to Surfline’s own leadership.
January
The fall term is where everyone starts. In January, students who want to build a company reapply for the entrepreneurship term — a pitch and an interview — and 20 of the 40 continue. Preferring the corporate path isn’t held against anyone; the venture term is simply a different job, and it assumes you now know what a unit economic is.
Now you are a founder.
February — May · Term two · Entrepreneurship
Every idea is taped up and the room reads all of them — then you’re told only ten businesses will be left standing. Students pulled their own paper off the wall to join an idea they believed in more. Each company gets two mentors: an entrepreneur who has scaled a company, and a USD MBA.
From here, every session is taught by founders — and all of it aims at one night in May.
Spring · Session 01
You don’t need a perfect idea to start. You need cash reserves to survive.
Danny Shepherd has founded six companies; he walked teams through three of them — including the eBay air-intake business he started at 18 that Fast & the Furious supercharged and bad credit terms killed. Then the whole room played the Risk Game.
Spring · Session 02
Getting known, and getting funded.
Jessie Rodriguez — from his father’s meat market to HGTV’s Vintage Flip — opened a real flip’s books ($84,000 profit on one Riverside house), then ran a viral-video contest. Adam Seery of Harvest Small Business Finance followed with how capital actually works — and every team applied to “the banker” for a loan.
Spring · Session 03
Investors bet on people, not just ideas.
Justin Nahama, co-founder of The Veteran Fund, broke down the twelve things every great pitch covers — jockey versus horse, traction, the ask. Then Lorens Attisha, founder & CEO of Soapy Joe’s, told the whole arc: candy at 10, the family business at 14, an abandoned car wash at 18 — 27 locations today.
19 May 2026
Ten student companies pitched to a panel that included a former co-head of distressed investing at Blackstone, the founding partner of a venture fund whose portfolio has raised over half a billion dollars, and a founder who has moved $1.8 billion in commercial real estate. Nineteen students. One night. Everyone’s family in the room.
First
Joey Orabona · Charlotte Bahk
A clean, plant-powered energy bar built for sustained focus without the crash.
Second
Drew Dawson
An AI nutrition platform for young adults that doesn’t make food feel like homework.
Third
Avery Shepard · Poppy Namazy · Emilia Hashemi
College planning, started earlier, with less last-minute panic.
People’s Choice
Not the judges’ call. The room voted, live, by QR code.
Roma Schwarz · Rebecca Kalkin
Custom apparel built around memories you can actually wear, linked by QR.
Prizes were real: shadowing days, M5 Macs, AI-enabled MacBook Pros. Students left able to keep building their companies on their own — with the hardware to do it.
Where to next