LTV Business School · Dubai · Founding Cohort

Two years. An accredited degree.
And a company that's actually yours.

Most business schools hand you theory and a diploma. We hand you operators who have built nine-figure businesses, real capital behind your startup, and a company you own the day you graduate.

Built by the team behind Long Tail Ventures · $100M+ in founder revenue · 10+ businesses acquired and scaled

24mo
Full-time founder program in Dubai
1:1
Three mentors assigned to every founder
$100K+
In capital available to the companies we back
1
Company you own by graduation, not a capstone deck

A business degree teaches you about business.
It rarely teaches you how to build one.

The numbers on the traditional path are not subtle. You pay a fortune, you learn theory from people who have never made payroll, and most graduates never start the thing the degree was supposed to prepare them for.

5%

of MBA graduates have started a company by graduation. Only 24.4% ever do, even years later, despite most saying that is exactly what they wanted.

Financial Times alumni survey, reported by Poets&Quants
89%

of companies say they actively avoid hiring recent graduates, citing a lack of real-world experience. The degree no longer signals what employers want.

Hult International Business School / Workplace Intelligence, 2024
77%

of graduates say they learned more in their first six months on the job than in four years of college. So why are you still paying for the lecture hall?

Hult International Business School / Workplace Intelligence, 2024
12.5%

median return on a degree, and roughly one in four graduates never sees a positive return at all. The math stopped working for most people.

New York Federal Reserve research, 2025
52%

of recent graduates work in jobs that never use their degree. Four years and six figures to end up somewhere your major was irrelevant.

Lumina Foundation / Cengage Graduate Employability Report, 2024
33 of 53

economies rate entrepreneurship education as the single weakest support a founder receives. The system was never built to create owners.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2025/2026

"It is possible to find tenured professors of management who have never set foot inside a real business, except as a customer."

Harvard Business Review, "How Business Schools Lost Their Way" — a critique that is two decades old and still unanswered.

We built the opposite of business school.

Same two years of your life. A completely different thing to show for it.

The traditional degree
You sit in lectures and study case studies about other people's companies
You are taught by academics, many of whom have never run a business
You are graded on exams and essays
You graduate with a transcript and a job search
You pay, and you leave with debt
Your professors have no stake in whether you ever succeed
LTV Business School
You build a real company from your first week. The business is the classroom
You are taught by operators who have built and scaled nine-figure businesses
You are measured on revenue, traction, and what you actually shipped
You graduate with an accredited degree and a company you own
We back the strongest companies with real investment capital
Our return depends entirely on whether your company wins

Twenty-four months. Three acts. One company that is real by the end.

You do not wait until graduation to start. From week one you are building. The curriculum exists to make your company work, not the other way around.

ACT I
Months 1 to 8 · Find & Build

Find the idea. Build the first version.

Come with an idea or find one here. You validate it against a real market, build a first version, and get your first users, while learning the fundamentals from people who have done it.

  • Idea validation and market discovery
  • Finance, marketing, and leadership, taught by operators
  • Your three mentors: business, mindset, and wellness
ACT II
Months 9 to 16 · Sell & Raise

Get to revenue. Get backed.

You move from building to selling. First paying customers, real sales motion, and your first capital, including the school's own investment in the companies that earn it.

  • Sales, pricing, and your first revenue
  • Fundraising and how investors actually decide
  • Access to LTV's capital and Dubai customer network
ACT III
Months 17 to 24 · Scale & Own

Scale it. Then graduate owning it.

You scale what is working, learn to hire and lead a team, and complete the program holding two things almost no graduate has: an accredited degree, and a company that is genuinely yours.

  • Scaling operations, hiring, and leadership
  • An international immersion in a global startup hub
  • An accredited business degree, awarded through our university partner

Operators, not academics

Every mentor in the building has built, scaled, or sold a real company. The people teaching you have signed the front of a paycheck, not just the back.

Real capital behind you

The school invests real money into the strongest companies in each cohort. We do not just grade your startup. We back it.

The Dubai advantage

Zero income tax, founder visas, and a network of operators and investors connecting MENA, Europe, and South Asia. You build where the next decade of growth is.

A degree that counts

Through our accredited university partner, you earn a recognized business degree. You get the credential and the company, not one or the other.

You don't leave with a resume.
You leave with equity.

A traditional degree is a receipt. It proves you paid and you attended. The day you graduate, you own a piece of paper and you start looking for a job.

Here, the thing you spend two years building is a real company that belongs to you. You keep the equity. We invest alongside you, which means the school only wins when you do. By the time you walk out, the goal is simple: own something worth more than the program ever cost.

This is the model proven by venture-builder schools worldwide, where students have collectively created hundreds of companies and hundreds of millions in value. We are bringing it to Dubai, and adding the capital.

What you buildA real, operating company
Who owns itYou do
Who invests in itLTV, alongside you
Who teaches youOperators who've done it
What you graduate withA degree and a business

Taught by people who have actually done it.

The problem with business school is the faculty. Ours is the answer. Your mentors are founders and operators with real scars and real outcomes, led by the team behind Long Tail Ventures.

MM
Mike Mammone
Co-Founder, LTV

Started at JP Morgan as a Private Client Banker, ranking top 250 of 20,000 reps. Left to build: bought and sold a retail store, became a top Amazon and eBay seller, then moved to Dubai and scaled a cloud kitchen to $30M ARR before a private equity acquisition. He teaches what it actually takes to buy a business and make it better.

DC
Dan Cortazio
Co-Founder, LTV

Started coding at 14, ran his first business at 16. Over two decades he bootstrapped multiple online businesses, then pivoted into paid media after a major setback and scaled ad tech to $5.1M in a single month. Today he runs roughly 70 people and proprietary systems processing over 1 billion data points a day. He teaches how to turn traffic and data into revenue.

And the best operators in Dubai. Built on 20 years of network, the school brings in founders, investors, and operators from across the city to teach the parts of business that are never in a textbook: closing the deal, raising the round, surviving the year nothing works. You learn the craft from people who are still in the arena.

It is not cheap. Neither is two years of your life.

A top MBA costs more than $250,000 and hands you a diploma. We charge less, and you walk out owning a company. Here is the honest math.

What this would cost to assemble elsewhere
An accredited business degree$120,000+
24 months of operator mentorship$80,000+
Seed capital for your company$50,000+
The network and the Dubai basePriceless
$250,000+

Roughly what a top MBA costs, with none of the ownership.

Founders' Track tuition
$98,000

For the full 24-month program. Around $4,083 a month, or AED 360,000 in total. Less than half the price of a top MBA, and you leave owning a company instead of looking for a job.

Apply and ask about scholarships

Most of our founders will not pay full tuition.

We award merit scholarships, up to 100%, to the founders we choose to back. The point is not to fill seats. It is to find people we would put our own capital behind. You are not applying to be admitted. You are applying to be invested in.

We are not looking for students.
We are looking for founders.

There is no entrance exam. We do not care what you scored on a standardized test. We care whether we would bet on you. The founding cohort is small, and most applicants are turned down.

Tell us your story

A short application and a video. Who you are, what you have built or want to build, and why you are not waiting for permission.

Solve a real problem

No multiple choice. You work through a real business challenge so we can see how you actually think, not how well you memorize.

Meet the operators

A conversation with the founders and mentors. This goes both ways. You are deciding on us as much as we are deciding on you.

Get backed

An offer to join the founding cohort, with your scholarship and the capital we are prepared to invest in what you build.

The things worth asking.

Is the degree actually accredited?
Yes. The degree is awarded through our accredited university partner, so the credential is real and recognized. What is different is everything around it: the people who teach you, what you build, and the fact that you graduate owning a company. The founding cohort partnership is being finalized now, and we will share the awarding partner with admitted founders.
What if I don't have a startup idea yet?
That is fine, and common. Plenty of the best founders start without a fixed idea. The first act of the program is built to help you find a real problem worth solving, validate it, and start building. We are betting on the person, not a pitch deck you wrote last week.
Do I really own my company?
Yes. The company you build is yours. You keep your equity. When the school invests capital into a company, it does so as an aligned investor on fair terms, the same way LTV invests in any business. Our upside only exists if yours does.
Who actually teaches?
Operators. The core faculty is the team behind Long Tail Ventures, founders with $100M+ in revenue and 10+ businesses acquired and scaled, supported by a rotating bench of founders, investors, and operators from across Dubai. Nobody is teaching you from theory alone.
How much does it cost, and can I get a scholarship?
List tuition for the full 24-month Founders' Track is $98,000. Most founders will not pay that. We award merit scholarships up to 100% to the people we choose to back. Apply, and we will be straight with you about what your number looks like.
Where is it, and what about visas?
The program is based in Dubai. It is one of the best places on earth to build a company right now: zero income tax, straightforward founder and student visa routes, and capital flowing in from three continents. We help admitted founders with the practical side of getting set up.
Is this instead of university, or as well as?
It replaces it. This is a full-time program that delivers an accredited degree and a real company in the time you would otherwise spend earning the degree alone. You are not doing this on the side. You are doing this instead.

Spend the next two years building something that's yours.

The founding cohort is forming now. If you would rather own a company than a transcript, start the conversation.

Small cohort · Highly selective · Scholarships available · Based in Dubai