I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School since the fall of 2004 and in a joint MBA with Columbia since 2005. This Tuesday I finished the lectures for this semester and my students are now working hard on their final project. A lot has happened since I first authored and taught [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Teaching | 15 Comments »
Entrepreneurs see things before others do. They recognize patterns, form hypotheses and act long before all the data is in. Von Clausewitz described this as seeing through the “fog of war.” When their hypotheses are wrong we say they were hallucinating. When they are right we call them visionaries. (The best entrepreneurs pivot on each hallucination [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 18 Comments »
I was catching up over coffee and a muffin with a student I hadn’t seen for years who’s now CEO of his own struggling startup. As I listened to him present the problems of matching lithium-ion battery packs to EV powertrains and direct drive motors, I realized that he had a built a product for [...]
Filed under: Marketing | 20 Comments »
One of the best ways to get a debate going into the entrepreneurial world is to throw the “Nature versus Nurture” hand-grenade into a conversation. The question is whether you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or whether you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur. Taking Sides Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Venture Capital | 14 Comments »
This week I’m at the California Coastal Commission hearing in Ventura California wearing my other hat as a public official for the State of California. After the hearing I drove up to Santa Barbara to give a talk to a Lean Startup Meetup. The talk, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” summarized my current thinking about [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, California Coastal Commission, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 17 Comments »
Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 36 Comments »
No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone, my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 54 Comments »
The Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship course at Stanford taught undergraduates how to take a technical idea and turn it into a profitable and scalable company. By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model. Students formed teams, [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 2 Comments »
I thought today was an appropriate time to tell this story. I’m hoping the Statute of Limitations has run out. ————- As I’ve gotten older, I realized that one of the skills I have is pattern recognition across large data sets. When I was young, I didn’t have much data. So back then I constructed [...]
Filed under: Air Force | 8 Comments »
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