Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development, Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture | 37 Comments »
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr. The barriers for starting a company have come down. Today the total available markets for new applications are hundreds of millions if not billion of users, while new classes of investors are popping up all over (angels, [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Teaching | 48 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part three. Part one is here, two is here. Syllabus is here. Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 11 Comments »
I gave a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of Entrepreneurship Week on the Democratization of Entrepreneurship. The first 11 minutes or so of the talk covers the post I wrote called “When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.” In it I observed that the barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 12 Comments »
Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What [...]
Filed under: Technology, Venture Capital | 50 Comments »
Our new Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. Syllabus here. By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to: [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 11 Comments »
For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship. In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. We thought it [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 37 Comments »
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Attributed to Ernest Shackleton In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South Pole. This would be one of the [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 4 Comments »
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