I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to you talk before Steve, it’s a fun experience to put a voice to the ideas I’ve been reading for quite a few months.

Big thanks for the continued sharing, and certainly the link to Lean Startups. I posted my first request for feedback there today.

I like your comment on “get liquid in a bubble”. Our startup was venture funded in 1999 and we didn’t pay enough attention to this advice! We also took over 6 months and $2M to get to an alpha and, yes, we built it in a vacuum. When we did get customer feedback that the product wasn’t exactly what they wanted it was hard to hear and also hard to recover from since we had spent most of our “A” round getting to that point. My takeway from that episode was fail fast, fail often – it’s easier now that it’s cheaper as well!

I also like the segment on characterizing your market. Sometimes that can be hard. For example, our company finances renewable energy installations (solar, fuel cell, etc.) and I am not sure if that is (a) a new market or (b) a segment of the existing market for energy. Under (a) we need to wait for the market to continue to develop, have reference customers, etc. while if it’s (b) we can shovel money out the door creating demand and sell into it. Renewable energy has elements of both though because it is a new product market, but also is better (cleaner) or cheaper (sometimes).

Thanks for the great post -

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