[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Tom Parkinson. I've been teaching, advising, and investing in entrepreneurs for over 30 years. I started my career as the leader of one of the first true seed capital funds in the Chicago area, where I invested in companies in partnership with an incubator that was led by Northwestern University. After that, I was a partner in a venture capital fund group in Chicago that raised over 130 million dollars to invest in companies across the Midwest and in Central Appalachia. Now, I'm at the University of Illinois, where I'm the senior director of one of the nation's longest running university-affiliated venture capital funds. We invest in startup companies that are affiliated with both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And our mission is to support companies that are commercializing university technology or that are led by students, faculty, or alumni of the university. I've also spent many years teaching entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance. I've taught courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at Ohio University, and the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. Most recently, I taught a course called New Venture Launch, at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. I'm really excited about the opportunity to teach this online course and the reason is that I believe that everybody should have at least a basic understanding of the entrepreneurial process. Because at some point in their career, they're going to have an idea. They're going to have an idea. They're going to have an opportunity. And it may happen multiple times throughout their careers. And each one of those is an opportunity, possibly, to create something wonderful, something that might have a really strong impact, a really important impact on their lives, maybe even on their communities, and the world. And I think it would be a shame if people don't take advantage of those opportunities because they don't know how to get started. I'm hoping that in this online course, I can help you catch the entrepreneurial bug and equip you with some of the skills that you may need to really take that leap when you have that opportunity.