I am super excited about today and woke up in advance of my alarm clock. Why? Because today is the first day of class for the second year of the NYU Stern Course I am co-teaching with Arun Sundararajan (btw, if you are interested in the sharing economy, I highly recommend Arun’s book). I love teaching, which is the reason I originally pursued a PhD.

The title of our course is “Tech and the City” (yes, pun on a “long ago” HBO show – we didn’t pick it, sort of a bit like writing a column and having the editor pick the headline). The subtitle though is more informative “Customer-Centric Digital Entrepreneurship in NYC” – the class is experiential, i.e. teams work with NYC startup – and focuses on understanding and improving customer experience through both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The key message from the class is that you need to combine both modes of analysis: quantitative *and* qualitative. The best companies have both outstanding data and analysis capabilities, but they also know how to observe and listen to customers. I describe it as standing on two legs.

This year I will blog a bit as the course goes along so that others can see what we cover. This will be somewhat limited by the fact that we are working closely with startups and doing actual projects which are covered by NDAs. So the posts will be more abstract and focus on principles. Today’s class will be about value creation – I will share some thoughts on that in my next post.