Michael Goldberg ’99 has built a global network of entrepreneurs on six continents, student by student, through his creation of a fantastically successful online course that shines a spotlight on the economic renaissance of Cleveland, Ohio.

In his new book, Beyond Silicon Valley, he traces how the online seminar of the same name connected with international business students since it was listed on Coursera in 2013.

The seminar’s articulation of key principles of entrepreneurship is the most translated massive open online course (aka MOOC) offered on Coursera, where students can take it in 16 languages, including Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Beyond Silicon Valley also remains among the most popular courses on the platform, with 175,000 students and counting.

In Beyond Silicon Valley, Goldberg relates how the course was inspired by a request from a Vietnamese government official, who asked that Goldberg lead a seminar that might help his country become more like Silicon Valley.

Goldberg, a venture capitalist, Case Western Reserve University entrepreneurship professor, and Cleveland native, replied that coursework on how entrepreneurial principles helped revive a scrappy Midwestern city might serve as a more useful example than the outsized booms and busts of Northern California.

“There are other ways, and other models, that can provide more help for entrepreneurs than Silicon Valley,” Goldberg says. His own analysis of Cleveland’s collective nurture of entrepreneurship with government outreach, philanthropy, nongovernmental organizations, and anchor institutions, such as hospitals and universities, offered such lessons.

While Cleveland may have been Goldberg’s inspiration, Beyond Silicon Valley looks far past the city on Lake Erie. The book tells the stories of students in Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa who took the course and found that they now share Goldberg’s vision that entrepreneurship can take hold anywhere in the right conditions.

“The course has provided an amazing teaching and learning opportunity,” he says. That opportunity consists of more than imbibing the seminar’s concepts. The students featured in Goldberg’s book created energetic, in-person discussions (“meetups”) and translated the subtitles of the course into their own languages.

Some 43 percent of students with strong engagement in Beyond Silicon Valley start a new business after taking the course, and Goldberg relates with relish how these budding entrepreneurs put the course’s teachings into action in their own communities—even in challenging environments, such as Venezuela, Botswana, and Kosovo.

“If you think it’s hard in Cleveland, some of these places are the next level of complicated,” observes Goldberg.

The global success described in Beyond Silicon Valley extends a focus on international affairs that has been a strong narrative in Goldberg’s career. He worked in the international development sector in South Africa with WorldTeach and the National Democratic Institute in the early 1990s, after graduating from Princeton University. Goldberg also joined AOL in 1999, working as director of the company’s international business development before leaving in 2003 to return to his hometown.

In between South Africa and AOL, however, Goldberg earned an MA in International Studies at SAIS in 1999, in concert with an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Because he completed the MBA first, Goldberg recalls that he was branded as a “Wharton person” when he first arrived at the Washington, D.C., campus. “No, no, I’d tell them. I’m a SAIS person,” he recalls.

He adds that his studies at SAIS made a strong imprint that help shaped the objectives of the course. “SAIS attracts students who want to make a difference in the world,” he says. “This project couldn’t be any more aligned with that.”

— Richard Byrne