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At times not losing is as important as winning.
Customer Validation
E.piphany was an 11-month-old startup with 31 people and on fire. We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software…read full post.
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As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. Berkeley. This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPadapproach (business model canvas + customer development) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century...read full post.
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We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…
John F. Kennedy, September 1962
Innovation
I teach entrepreneurship for ~50 student teams a year from engineering schools atStanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach ~150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience…read full post.
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Inc. magazine is publishing a 12-part series of excerpts from The Startup Owner’s Manual, the new step-by-step “how to” guide for startups. The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com, highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Feedback from my readers suggested you’d appreciate seeing the series posted here, as well.Whether your venture is a new pizza parlor or the hottest new software product, beware: These nine flawed assumptions are toxic…read full post.
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Faced with disruptive innovation, you can be sure any possibility for innovation dies when a company forms a committee for an “overarching strategy.” I was reminded how innovation dies when the email below arrived in my inbox. It was well written, thoughtful and had a clearly articulated sense of purpose. You may have seen one like it in your school or company…read full post.
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We’ve taught our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and the National Science Foundation in 8 week, 10 week and 12 week versions. We decided to find out what was the Minimum Viable Product for our Lean LaunchPad class…read full post.
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The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human socialneeds and figure out how to mediate them on-line. (Look at the first wave of the web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora, Zynga, WordPress, LinkedIn.)…read full post.
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Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun?/i?pif?n?/
A moment of sudden revelation or insight
We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur…read full post.
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When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model…read full post.
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We ran the first National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class October to December 2011. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology…read full post.
