It’s Not How Big It Is – It’s How Well It Performs: The Startup Genome Compass

Posted on August 29, 2011 by steveblank

What makes startups succeed or fail? More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near death experiences along the way. Simply put, while we now have some good theory, we just are not very good at creating startups yet. After 50 years of technology entrepreneurship it’s still an art.

Three months ago I wrote about my ex-student Max Marmer and the Startup Genome Project. They’ve been attempting to quantify the art. They believe that they can crack the code of innovation and turn entrepreneurship into a science if they had hard data rather than speculation of why startups succeed or fail. Max and his partners had interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. In May they released the first Startup Genome Report— an in-depth analysis on what makes early-stage Internet startups successful.

Now 90 days later Max and his team have gathered data on 3200 startups and they believe they’ve discovered the most common reason startups fail.

Today you’re invited to benchmark your own internet startup and see how you compare to the winners.

———

Benchmarking Your Startup
I hadn’t heard from Max for awhile so I thought he took the summer off. I should have known better, it turned out he was hard at work.

Max and his team built a website called the Startup Genome Compass (their benchmarking web site) that allows an Internet startup to evaluate their business performance. The Startup Genome Compass uses a hybrid “Stage and Type” model that describes how startups progress through their business development lifecycle.

The benchmark takes 20 or so minutes to go through as series of questions, and in the end it spits out an analysis of how you are doing.

The benchmark is not perfect, it may even be flawed, but it is head and shoulders above what we have now – which is nothing – for giving Internet startups founders specific advice on best practices.  If you have a few world-class VC’s on your board you’re probably getting this advice in person. If you’re like thousands of other startups struggling to get started, it’s worth a look.

It’s Not How Big It Is – It’s How Well It Performs
If you’re interested (and you should be) in how you compare to other early stage ventures, they summarized their results in a report “Startup Genome Report Extra: Premature Scaling.”

One of the biggest surprises is that success isn’t about size – of team or funding. It turns out Premature Scaling is the leading cause of hemorrhaging cash in a startup – and death. In fact:

  • The team size of startups that scale prematurely is 3 times bigger than the consistent startups at the same stage
  • 74% of high growth Internet startups fail due to premature scaling
  • Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely
  • 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold

The last time I wrote about Max I said, “I can’t wait to see what Max does by the time he’s 21.” Turns out his birthday is in a week, September 7th.

Happy birthday Max.

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Market Types | 14 Comments »

Hiring – Easy as Pie

Posted on August 22, 2011 by steveblank

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten involved in hiring for two startups, a public agency and a non profit.  Part of each conversation was getting asked to help them put together a “job spec.”

I had them leave with a pie chart.

——–

There must be something in the air. In the last week I had four separate groups through the ranch all wanting to talk either about hiring a senior exec or a senior exec looking for a new job. Having sat through these job discussions as an entrepreneur, board member, and now an interested observer, here’s what I concluded:

  1. Decide whether you’re hiring someone to help search for the business model or to help execute a business model you’ve already found (same is true is you’re looking for a job – are you going to be searching or executing?) Are you looking for a visionary or an operating executive?
  2. The job spec’s for the same title differ wildly depending on whether the job requires search versus execution skills. Founders search, operating executives execute.

If you’re hiring an operating executive (CEO, VP, Executive Director, etc.)

  • Don’t start with the candidate (board member x has a great VP of sales he knows, founder y wants this CEO he met at a conference, etc.)
  • Don’t even start with the job spec

Since I’ve always been a visual guy, job specs with their long lists of job requirements always left me cold. My eyes would glaze over at these recruiter/board wish lists. I wished there was a way to see them at a glance. (Just to be clear this isn’t the entire hiring process, just a way to visually begin the discussion.) So here’s my suggestion: Start with a Pie Chart.

  1. Draw a pie chart.
  2. List all the job specs as slices
  3. Adjust the width of the pie segments by importance. (Extra credit if you get the current CEO or internal candidate to help you write/draw the slices and weight their importance. Everyone involved in the hire gets to have an opinion on the slices and weights, but the person/group making the hiring decision gets to decide which ones to include.)
  4. Now that you have this spec, evaluate each candidate by showing his/her competence in each slice by length
  5. Compare candidates
  6. Easy as pie!

Lessons Learned

  • Are you hiring for search or execution skills?
  • Show the job requirements visually as a pie chart
  • Prioritize each requirement by the width of the pie
  • Show your assessment of each candidate’s competencies by the length of the slices
  • Now with the data in front of you, the conversation about hiring can start

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | 31 Comments »

Reinventing the Board Meeting – Part 2 of 2 – Virtual Valley Ventures

Posted on June 2, 2011 by steveblank

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come
Victor Hugo

When The Boardroom is Bits
A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. It’s time to ask why startup board governance has failed to keep pace with innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time for a change.

Reinventing the board meeting may allow venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer angel-funded startups that don’t have formal boards or directors (because of geography or size of investment) to attract experienced advice and investment outside of technology clusters (i.e. Silicon Valley, New York).

Here’s how.

A Hypothesis – The Boardroom As Bits
Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. And to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas.

Yet even with all these tools, early stage startups still need to physically meet with advisors and investors. That’s great if you can get it.  But what if you can’t?

What’s missing is a way to communicate all this complex information and get feedback and guidance for startups who cannot get advice in a formal board meeting.

We propose that early stage startups communicate in a way that didn’t exist in the 20th century – online – collaboratively through blogs.

We suggest that the founders/CEO invest 1 hour a week providing advisors and investors with “Continuous Information Access” by blogging and discussing their progress online in their startup’s search for a business model. They would:

What Does this Change?
1) Structure. Founders operate in a chaotic regime. So it’s helpful to have a structure that helps “search”
 for a business model. The “boardroom as bits” uses Customer Development as the process for the search, and the business model canvas as the scorecard to keep track of the progress, while providing a common language for the discussion.

This approach offers VC’s and Angels a semi-formal framework for measuring progress and offering their guidance in the “search”
 for a business model. It turns ad hoc startups into strategy-driven startups.

2) Asynchronous Updates. Interaction with advisors and board members can now be decoupled from the – once every six weeks, “big event” – board meeting. Now, as soon as the founders post an update, everyone is notified. Comments, help, suggestions and conversation can happen 24/7. For startups with formal boards, it makes it easy to implement, track, and follow-up board meeting outcomes.

Monitoring and guiding a small angel investment no longer requires the calculus to decide whether the investment is worth a board commitment. It potentially encourages investors who would invest only if they had more visibility but where the small number of dollars doesn’t justify the time commitment.

A board as bits ends the repetition of multiple investor coffees. It’s highly time-efficient for investor and founder alike.

3) Coaching. This approach allows real-time monitoring of a startup’s progress and zero-lag for coaching and course-correction.  It’s not just a way to see how they’re doing. It also provides visibility for a deep look at their data over time and facilitates delivery of feedback and advice.

4) Geography. When the boardroom is bits, angel-funded startups can get experienced advice – independent of geography. An angel investor or VC can multiply their reach and/or depth. In the process it reduces some of the constraints of distance as a barrier to investment.

Imagine if a VC took $4 million (an average Series A investment) and instead spread it across 40 deals at $100K each in a city with a great outward-facing technology university outside of Silicon Valley. In the past they had no way to monitor and manage these investments. Now they can. The result – an instant technology cluster – with equity at a fraction of Silicon Valley prices.  It might be possible to create Virtual Valley Ventures.

We Ran the Experiment
At Stanford our Lean Launchpad class ran an experiment that showed when “the boardroom is bits” can make a radical difference in the outcome of an early stage startup.

Our students used Customer Development as the process to search for a business model. The used a blog to record their customer learning, and their progress and issues. The blog became a narrative of the search by posting customer interviews, surveys, videos, and prototypes. They used the Business Model Canvas as a scorekeeping device to chart their progress. The result invited comment from their “board” of the teaching team.

Here are some examples of how rich the interaction can become when a management team embraces the approach.

We were able to give them near real-time feedback as they posted their results. If we had been a board rather than a teaching team we would have added physical reality checks with Skype and/or face-to-face meetings.

Show Me the Money
While this worked in the classroom, would it work in the real world? I thought this idea was crazy enough to bounce off a five experienced Silicon Valley VC’s. I was surprised at the reaction – all of them want to experiment with it. Jon Feiber at MDV is going to try investing in startups emerging from Universities with great engineering schools outside of Silicon Valley that have entrepreneurship programs, but minimal venture capital infrastructure. (The University of Michigan is a possible first test.) Kathryn Gould of Foundation Capital and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate also want to try it.

Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures not only thought the idea had merit but seed-funded the LeanLaunchLab, a startup building software to automate and structure this process. (More than 700 startups signed up for the LeanLaunchLab software the day it was first demo’d.) Other entrepreneurs think this is an idea whose time has come and are also building software to manage this process including Alexander Osterwalder, Groupiter, and Angelsoft. Citrix thought this was such a good idea that their Startup Accelerator has offered to provide GoToMeeting and GoToMeeting HD Faces free to participating VC’s and startups. Contact them here.

Summary
For startups with traditional boards, I am not suggesting replacing the board meeting – just augmenting it with a more formal, interactive and responsive structure to help guide the search for the business model. There’s immense value in face-to-face interaction. You can’t replace body language.

But for Angel-funded companies I am proposing that a “board meeting in bits” can dramatically change the odds of success. Not only does this approach provide a way for founders to “show your work” to potential and current investors and advisors, but also it helps expand opportunities to attract investors from outside the local area.

Lessons Learned

  • Startups are a search for a business model
  • Startups can share their progress/get feedback in the search
  • Weekly blog of the customer development narrative
  • Weekly summary of the business model canvas
  • Interactive comments and questions
  • Skype and face-to-face when needed
  • This may be a way to augment traditional board meetings
  • This might be a way to rethink our notion of geography as a barrier to investments

Or watch the video here.

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching, Venture Capital | 34 Comments »

Why Board Meetings Suck – Part 1 of 2

Posted on June 1, 2011 by steveblank

There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Jonathan Swift

What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings
As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer angel-funded startups – which because of geography or size of investment typically don’t have formal boards or directors – to attract experienced advice and investment outside of technology clusters (i.e. Silicon Valley, New York).

Here’s how.

Because We’ve Always Done It This Way
The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. Yet boards of large companies exist to monitor efficient strategy and execution of a known business model. While startups eventually get into execution mode, their initial stages are devoted to a non-linear, chaotic search for a business model: finding product/market fit to identify a product or service people will buy in droves at a sustainable, profitable pace.

In the last few years, our understanding that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, made us recognize that startups need their own tools, different from those used in existing companies: Customer Development – the process to search for a Business Model, the Business Model Canvas – the scorecard to measure progress in the search, and Agile Engineering – the tools to physically construct the product.

Yet while we’ve reinvented how startups build their companies, startup investors are still having board meetings like it’s the 19th century.

Why Have a Board Meeting?
From a VC’s point of view there are two reasons for board meetings.

1) It’s their fiduciary responsibility. Once a startup gets going, it has asymmetric information. Investors get board seats to assure themselves and their limited partners that they are duly informed about their investment.

2) Investors believe that their experience and guidance can maximize their return. Here it’s the board that has asymmetric knowledge. A veteran board can bring 50-100x more experience into a board meeting than a first time founder. (VC’s sit on 6 – 12 boards at a time. Assume an average tenure of 4 years per board. Assume two veteran VC’s per board.
=
50-100x more experience.)

From a founder’s point of view there are three reasons for board meetings.

1) It’s an obligation that came with the check.

2) Founders who have a great board do recognize the uncanny pattern recognition skills that good VC’s bring.

3) An experienced board brings an extensive network of customers, partners, help in recruiting, follow-on financing, etc.

What’s Wrong With a Board Meeting?
The Wrong Metrics. Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. Most board meetings never get past big company metrics to focus on the crucial startup numbers. That’s simply a failure of a startup board’s fiduciary responsibility.

The Wrong Discussions. The most important advice/guidance that should come from investors in a board meeting is about a startup’s search for a business model: What are the business model hypotheses? What are the most important hypotheses to test now? How are we progressing validating each hypothesis? What do those numbers/metrics look like? What are the iterations and Pivots – and why?

Not Real-time.  Startup board meetings occur every 4-6 weeks. While that’s great when you showed up in your horse and buggy, the strategy-to-tactic-to implementation lag is painful at Internet speeds. And unless there’s rigor in the process, because there is no formal structure for follow up, tracking what happened as a result of meeting recommendations and action items gets lost in the daily demands of everyone’s work. (Of course great VC’s mix in coffees, phone calls, coaching and other non-board meeting interactions but it’s ad hoc and not always done.)

Wastes Founders Time. For the founders, “the get ready for the board meeting” drill is often a performance rather than a snapshot. Powerpoints, spreadsheets and rehearsals consume time for materials that are used once and discarded. There are no standards for what each side (board versus management) does. What is the entrepreneur supposed to be doing? What are the board members supposed to be contributing?

The Wrong Structure. If you read advice on how to run a board meeting you’ll get advice that would have felt comfortable to Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller.

In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule? Why do we need to wait a month to six weeks to see progress? Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams?

Angels In America
For angel-funded startups, life is even tougher. Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth. If you’re in a technology cluster like Silicon Valley you may be able to attract ad hoc advice from experienced investors. But very little of it is formal, and almost none of it approaches the 50-100x experience level of professional investors.

As there’s no formal board, most of these angel/investors meetings are over coffees. And lacking a board meeting there’s no formal mechanism to get investor advice. Angel investments in mobile and web apps today are approaching the “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” strategy.

And for startups outside of technology clusters, there’s almost no chance of attracting Silicon Valley VC’s or angels. Geography is a barrier to investment.

So given all this, the million dollar question is: Why in the age of the Internet haven’t we adopted the tools we build/sell to solve these problems?

In the next post – Reinventing the Board Meeting.

Lessons Learned

  • Early stage board meetings are often clones of large company board meetings
  • That’s very, very wrong
  • Angel-funded startups have no formal mechanism for experienced advice
  • There’s a better way

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching, Venture Capital | 19 Comments »

The Apprentice – Entrepreneur Version

Posted on April 26, 2011 by steveblank

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master
Ernest Hemingway

Silicon Valley is built on simple myths – one of the most pervasive is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school by 20 year olds from Stanford or Harvard. The reality is these are the exceptions not the rule.

Too Old at 30?
I was having coffee with an ex-student at the ranch, watching our bobcat hunt in the front lawn. This student had called and said he had to meet  - “I’m having a career crisis,” was how he described it. I invited him to make the drive down.

As the story unfolded, it turned out that he just turned 30 and realized that he hadn’t founded a company yet. “Everyone now starts a company out of school. All my classmates who were interested in entrepreneurship have started their own companies. I’ve just been working my way up the ladder.” He explained that he had a progressively set of better jobs at companies that were in the “build” phase. These ex-startups had found a repeatable business model and were putting the processes in place to grow into a large company. They had hired operating executives and were starting to scale.

“Well what’s wrong with what you’ve been doing?” I asked. “Oh, I’ve learned a ton,” he replied. “If I had started a company out of school I would have made all kind of stupid mistakes.”

Ok I wondered, the problem is what? “So how have your friends done?” We watched as the bobcat patiently stalked a gopher. “Hmm” he said,  ”A few did ok, but most of them cratered their startups. For the amount of money they made most of them would have been better off working at Walmart.”

Slow Learner
I told him he wasn’t alone. Early in my career I apprenticed at companies that had recently been startups, hadn’t yet gone public and were still innovative. My career was a slow 20-year progression from training instructor to product marketing manager to VP of Marketing. It wasn’t until my 7th startup that I was a CEO in a startup I co-founded (and its failure left a crater so deep it had it’s own Iridium layer.)

Perhaps the most important part of this non-metoric career trajectory was the mentoring I received. I managed to work for, with, and around people who were truly skilled at what they did. Some of them consciously taught and shared their skills. For others I tried my best to suck out every bit of what they knew and emulate the best of their skills. (At times the learning was painful, but it was never forgotten.)

While the Silicon Valley myth is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school it’s just not true.

No Longer a Startup
In raw numbers, most engineers and MBA’s aren’t founding companies, they’re going to work for others who have; Facebook, Google, Zynga, Four Square, Twitter, etc. While the jobs at these companies are still incredibly challenging, and passion and innovation may still pervade their company cultures, the startup risk (“will we run out of money before we find our customers?”) is gone. As great as these companies may be, they are no longer startups. (A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.)

But employees in these ex-startups are getting the best hands-on education for entrepreneurship there is – as apprentices.

Apprentice
As we watched the bobcat make a meal out of the gopher I offered that his career was proceeding just fine. Someday, he’ll hear a calling, pull his head out of his computer, look around and say, “I can do this myself.”

And the cycle of creative destruction will begin anew.

Lessons Learned

  • Not all startups are founded by 20-somthings straight out of college
  • Working for companies that were recently startups is a great way to apprentice
  • These companies can you give a lifetime of mentorship hard to achieve in other ways
  • When you’re ready you’ll hear a calling, and it won’t be a job

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Family/Career/Culture | 9 Comments »

Entrepreneurs Are Artists

Posted on April 9, 2011 by steveblank

I wrote about entrepreneurs as artists in a previous post.

The FounderLy team interviewed me and got me to give a better explanation of what I was trying to say in this 2 minute video clip.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture | 26 Comments »

Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job

Posted on March 31, 2011 by steveblank

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 do it.

I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

Where Did We Go Wrong?
It’s not that the tools are wrong, I think the entrepreneurship management stack is correct and has made a major contribution to reducing startup failures. Where I think we have gone wrong is the belief that anyone can use these tools equally well.

Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job
For the sake of this analogy, think of two types of artists: composers and performers (think music composer versus members of the orchestra, playwright versus actor etc.)

Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers. This concept of creating something that few others see – and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it – is at the heart of what startup founders do. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management.

Entrepreneurial employees are the talented performers who hear the siren song of a founder’s vision. Joining a startup while it is still searching for a business model, they too see the promise of what can be and join the founder to bring the vision to life.

Founders then put in play every skill which makes them unique – tenacity, passion, agility, rapid pivots, curiosity, learning and discovery, improvisation, ability to bring order out of chaos, resilience, leadership, a reality distortion field, and a relentless focus on execution – to lead the relentless process of refining their vision and making it a reality.

Both founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer to build something from the ground up rather than join an existing company. Like jazz musicians or improv actors, they prefer to operate in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns. They sense the general direction they’re headed in, OK with uncertainty and surprises, using the tools at hand, along with their instinct to achieve their vision. These types of people are rare, unique and crazy. They’re artists.

Tools Do Not Make The Artist
When page-layout programs came out with the Macintosh in 1984, everyone thought it was going to be the end of graphic artists and designers. “Now everyone can do design,” was the mantra. Users quickly learned how hard it was do design well (yes. it is an art) and again hired professionals. The same thing happened with the first bit-mapped word processors. We didn’t get more or better authors. Instead we ended up with poorly written documents that looked like ransom notes. Today’s equivalent is Apple’s “Garageband”. Not everyone who uses composition tools can actually write music that anyone wants to listen to.

“Well If it’s Not the Tools Then it Must Be…”
The argument goes, “Well if it’s not tools then it must be…” But examples from teaching other creative arts are not promising. Music composition has been around since the dawn of civilization yet even today the argument of what “makes” a great composer is still unsettled. Is it the process (the compositional strategies used in the compositional process?) Is it the person (achievement, musical aptitude, informal musical experiences, formal musical experiences, music self-esteem, academic grades, IQ, and gender?)  Is it the environment (parents, teachers, friends, siblings, school, society, or cultural values?) Or is it constant practice (apprenticeship, 10,000 hours of practice?)

It may be we can increase the number of founders and entrepreneurial employees, with better tools, more money, and greater education. But it’s more likely that until we truly understand how to teach creativity, their numbers are limited.

Lessons Learned

  • Founders fit the definition of an artist: they see – and create– something that no one else does
  • To help them move their vision to reality, they surround themselves with world-class performers
  • Founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer operating in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns
  • These type of people are rare, unique and crazy
  • Not everyone is an artist

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture | 39 Comments »

Napkin Entrepreneurs

Posted on March 29, 2011 by steveblank

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, superangels, archangels, and even seraphim and cherubim have been spotted.)

Entrepreneurship departments are now the cool thing to have in colleges and universities, and classes on how to start a company are being taught over a weekend, a month, six weeks, and via correspondence course.

If the opportunity is so large, and the barriers to starting up so low, why haven’t the number of scalable startups exploded exponentially? What’s holding us back?

It might be that it’s easier than ever to draw an idea on the back of the napkin, it’s still hard to quit your day job.

Napkin Entrepreneurs
One of the amazing consequences of the low cost of creating web and mobile apps is that you can get a lot of them up and running simultaneously and affordably. I call these app development projects “science experiments.”

These web science experiments are the logical extension of the Customer Discovery step in the Customer Development process. They’re a great way to brainstorm outside the building, getting real customer feedback as you think through your ideas about value proposition/customer/demand creation/revenue model.

They’re the 21st century version of a product sketch on a back of napkin. But instead of just a piece of  paper, you end up with a site that users can visit, use and even pay for.

Ten of thousands of people who could never afford to start a company can now start several over their lunch break. And with any glimmer of customer interest they can decide whether they want to:

  • run it as a part-time business
  • commit full-time to build a “buyable startup” (~$5-$25 Million exit)
  • commit full-time and try to build a scalable startup

But it’s important to note what these napkin projects/test are not. They are not a company, nor are they are a startup. Running them doesn’t make you a founder. And while they are entrepreneurial experiments, until you actually commit to them by choosing one idea, quitting your day job and committing yourself 24/7 it’s not clear that the word “founder or entrepreneur” even applies.

Lessons Learned

  • The web now allows you to turn your “back of the napkin” ideas into live experiments
  • Running lots of app experiments is a great idea
  • But these experiments are not a company and you’re not a “founder”. You’re just a “napkin entrepreneur.”
  • Founding a company is an act of complete commitment

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Teaching | 50 Comments »

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

Posted on March 21, 2011 by steveblank

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. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten.

My hypotheses is that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our own revolution. We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the American economy and our Gross Domestic Product began to take off and the U.S. and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before.  It may be the dawn of a new era for a new American economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

If you can’t see the video above, click here.)

If you’ve seen my other talks, after the first 11 minutes you can skip to ~1:04 with the Sloan versus Durant story and some interesting student Q&A. You can follow the talk along with the slides I used, below.

(If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.)

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 12 Comments »

Honor and Recognition in Event of Success

Posted on March 2, 2011 by steveblank

“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 most heroic journeys of exploration ever undertaken. In it Shackleton defined courage and leadership.

Over the last year I’ve been lucky enough to watch the corporate equivalent at a major U.S. corporation – starting a new technology division bringing disruptive technology to market at General Electric.

One of GE’s new divisions – GE’s Energy Storage – has been given the charter to bring an entirely new battery technology to market. This battery works equally well whether it’s below freezing or broiling hot. It’s high density, long life, environmentally friendly and can go places other batteries can’t.

This is a new division of a large, old company where one would think innovation had long been beaten out of them. You couldn’t be more wrong. The Energy Storage division is acting like a startup, and Prescott Logan its General Manager, has lived up to the charter. He’s as good as any startup CEO in Silicon Valley. Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. They’ve gained as good of an insight into customer needs and product feature set than any startup I’ve seen. And they’ve continuously iterated and gone through a few pivots of their business model. (Their current initial markets for their batteries include telecom, utilities, transportation and Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) markets.) And they’ve being doing this while driving product cost down and performance up.

GE’s performance in implementing Customer Development gives lie to the tale that only web startups can be agile. Corporate elephants can dance.

So why this post?

GE’s Energy Storage division is looking to hire two insanely great people who can act like senior execs in a startup:

  • A leader of Customer Development — think of it as a Product Manger running a product line who knows how to get out of the building and not write MRD’s but listen to customers.
  • A Sales Closer – a salesman who can make up the sales process on the fly and bring in deals without a datasheet, price list or roadmap. They will build the sales team that follows.

If you’ve been intrigued by the notion of customer development in an early stage startup —getting out of the building to talk to customers and working with an engineering team that’s capable of being agile and responsive – yet backed by a $150 billion corporation, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. (The good news/bad news is that you’ll spend ½ your time on airplanes listening to customers.)

If you have 10 years of product management or sales experience, and think that you have extraordinary talent to match the opportunity, submit your resume by: 1) Clicking on Customer Development or Sales Closer, and 2) Emailing your resume to Prescott Logan at prescott.logan@ge.com Tell him you want to sign up for the adventure.

Honor and recognition in event of success.

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 4 Comments »

The Cover-Up Culture

Posted on January 10, 2011 by steveblank

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”

There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-up’s are so ingrained that we take them for granted.

Yet for a startup a cover-up culture is death. In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set.

Lie to My Face
The first time I saw a corporate cover-up was as a new board member of a medium size public company. The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later. The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) I knew this from talking to his people before the board meeting so none of this was a surprise. What was a surprise was the boldface lies the VP told us at the board meeting. “The product’s on schedule. No problems. We’ll make the numbers.” The disconnect between reality and a senior executive’s willingness to blatantly lie to his CEO and board just blew me away.

It would have been so much simpler for him to say, “We’re screwed, and I need your help.” Until I dug deeper and realized that the entire company had a “cover-up culture” – the CEO punished failure and bad news. Since only good news was rewarded (as defined by the revenue and product plan shared with Wall Street analysts,) I understood why avoiding bad news and covering mistakes was the general manager’s rational choice in this company. Because earlier in my career I had a board that beat me senseless when I missed a milestone.

Cover-up Or Look Like an Idiot
In large companies executives are hired and compensated for pristine and efficient execution. If you screw up, there’s an unspoken assumption that you’ve screwed up a known process – something that was repeatable and predictable. You cover up because your screw-ups not only make you look like a failure, but everyone up the line (your boss, their boss, etc.) look like an idiot. Further, the odds are that the information you hide won’t immediately be discovered or damage the company.

I mention this not because this post is about cover-ups in large companies, (I’ll leave that to the experts in organizational behavior and social theory) but to contrast it with the very different kind of culture that startups need to survive.

The Cover-Up Culture: The Role of the Board
As a founder I quickly learned how open I could be with my board. A few times I had not so great investors who believed that a startup should unfold like a Harvard case study. They ignored the reality that most startups are a chaotic set of events from which founders are trying to extract a repeatable and profitable pattern. The first time I delivered bad news I got my head handed to me. The lesson this chastened CEO took from that board meeting? Don’t tell this board bad news.

In other startups I was lucky and had great investors who knew how to manage and deal with chaos. They realized that conditions change so rapidly that the original business plan hypotheses becomes irrelevant. These investors taught me metrics appropriate for searching for a business model, how to work with the board when I didn’t make a milestone, and how we would figure out when it was time to change the strategy. I thought of these board members as partners and I shared everything with them; good, bad and ugly.

These board members encouraged me to instill the right culture in the company. They reminded me that failures in startups tell the founders which direction not to pursue – while teaching you how to succeed. This means covering up failure in a startup was like tossing their money in the street. So instead of a cover-up culture they encouraged a “Lessons Learned culture.”

Startups: Good News Needs to Travel Fast, but Bad News Needs to Travel Faster
A key element of a “Lessons Learned” culture is rapid dissemination of information. All information, whether good or bad, must be shared rapidly. We taught our company that understanding sales losses were more important than understanding sales wins; understanding why a competitor’s products were better was more important than rationalizing ways in which ours were superior. All news, but especially bad news, needed to be shared, dissected, understood, and acted on. At each weekly department and company meeting we discussed what worked and hadn’t. And when we found employees who hoarded information or covered up problems we removed them. They were cultural poison for a startup.

The resulting conversations made us smarter, agile and relentless.

Lessons Learned

  • Startups are built around rapid iterations of hypotheses. Most of them turn out be wrong
  • Make sure your board is not beating up on the truth
  • Build a culture of rapid dissemination of all news; good or bad
  • Founders lead by example in sharing Lessons Learned
  • Collectively analyze failures,then iterate, pivot and try again
  • A cover-up culture is death to a startup
  • Fire employees who hoard information or hide bad news

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 27 Comments »

The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition

Posted on September 20, 2010 by steveblank

One of the ironies of being a startup is that when you are small no one can put you out of business but you. Paradoxically, as your revenues and market share increase the risk of competitors damaging your company increases.

Often the cause is the inability to grow the startup past the worldview of its founders.

We’re Getting Our Butts Kicked
One of my ex-engineering students helped start a six-year old company headquartered in Los Angeles that sells to government agencies. (They had funded this company themselves after their last networking company got acquired.) While he had designed a good part of the product, he now found himself the titular head of sales and marketing. We usually catch up when he’s in town, but this time he said he was bringing his co-founder.

“We’re trying to solve a puzzle in sales. We’re not sure you know anything about our market but we sure would like to talk it through. We’re suddenly getting our butts kicked in our sales to the government.”

I knew their business fairly well. They were the darlings of the three-letter agencies in Washington. Their equipment was used almost everywhere. And for the last few years they couldn’t make and deliver their product fast enough. Last year they had done over $50 million in sales. Now, over lunch I heard that for the first time sales were getting tougher. It even looked as if they might not make this year’s sales forecast.

“What’s changed?” I asked. “Well things were going great last year, but now we’re competing for larger orders and for the first time we have to go through competitive bids with formal Request For Proposals – RFP’s. Fortune 100 companies who never had a product in this space are saying that they can deliver what we can. We know that’s not true, but we’re getting our butts kicked. They’re also bundling in services and other products we don’t have and can’t offer. We even lost a few orders we didn’t even know were out for bid.”

He’s A Nice Guy
Trying to understand a bit more about their sales process, I asked them to tell me why their sales were so easy for the last few years. My student looked almost blissful when he described the process, “Oh, customers found our product by word of mouth. We solve a really hard and important problem. We’d give a demo, they’d bring their boss over, jaws would drop, and we’d get an order. We’d install the system, more people could see what it would do and then we’d get more orders. Doing all those demos took up a lot of my travel time so I hired someone from one of the customers as our Washington sales person.” Hmm, a hint.

My student had always struck me as very smart, driven, articulate and a “nice guy.” His co-founder seemed to have the same temperament. I ventured a question, “Is your sales head a nice guy?” “Why yes, he fits perfectly into our company culture.”  And he then went into a long soliloquy about their company culture of respect, ethics, compatibility, mission, etc, etc.

“So do your competitors have the same culture?”

The Peter Pan Syndrome
There was a bit of a pause as he thought, and said, “I don’t exactly know, but I’d guess not. They’re mostly multi-billion dollar companies who’ve been around a long time and they seem a lot tougher and willing to do anything to get an order. They even put things in their RFP responses that I bet aren’t true.”

It was about then that I remembered that one of the key reasons that these entrepreneurs had funded the company themselves was that they didn’t want any VC’s on their board. “Our VC’s screwed us in our last company, and now that we could afford it we don’t need them.” So far they hadn’t seemed to suffer. But now I was curious. “Any killer sales people on your board of directors?” They listed a couple of world-class engineering professors and a retired customer who had pointed them to some key early sales. But it dawned on me what they might be missing.

A Killer Sales Culture
“My first observation is that you guys don’t even know what you don’t know,” I suggested. “Large procurements for government agencies are being played out on level you aren’t participating in. There’s a game going on around you that you don’t even know about.” So far they hadn’t got up and left so I continued. “I think the root cause is that you two are “nice guys.” Your company needs to grow up – not in a way that changes your entire company culture, but enough to realize that the world outside your offices doesn’t match your idealistic view of how things should operate. The question is whether you are willing to accept that some part of how you sell may have to change.”

My ex-student asked, “Are you suggesting we hire a new Washington sales person?” “Actually no. Not yet,” I offered. Of all cities, Washington had an abundance of seasoned sales people that could teach them how the game was played. Turning to my student, “I think you need to go to Washington, hire one or more of these grizzled sales veterans as consultants and have them teach you what you need to know. If you are going to compete in Federal procurements, your company is going to have to grow up to play on another level, and eventually you are going to have to hire a team that can play that game.

But first you need to become a domain expert. Spend a year in Washington.”

Lessons Learned

  • When the big guys discover your market you need to recognize their game.
  • You don’t have to play by their rules, but to understand what they are.
  • Then you need to develop a strategy that lets you compete.
  • Otherwise they will eat your lunch.

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Job Titles That Can Sink Your Startup

Posted on September 13, 2010 by steveblank

I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time articulating why.

Here’s one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a large company.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want
I hadn’t seen Rajiv in the two years since he started his second company. He had raised a seed round and then a Series A from a name brand Venture firm. I was glad to see him but it was clear over coffee that he was struggling with his first hiring failure. “I’ve been running our company, cycling through Customer Discovery and Validation and the board suggested that I was running out of bandwidth and needed some help in closing our initial orders. They suggested I get a VP of Sales to help.”

It was deja vu all over again. I knew where this conversation was going. “Let me guess, your VC’s helped you find a recruiter?”

“Yeah, and they were great. They helped me hire the best VP of Sales I could find. The recruiter verified all the references and he completely checked out. He was in the top 1% club at (insert the name of your favorite large company here.) He’s been in sales for almost 15 years.”

I listened as he told me the rest of the story. “I thought our new Sales VP would be out in front helping us lead Customer Validation and help us find the Pivot. That was the plan. We had talked about it in the interview and he said he understood and agreed that’s what he would do. Even when we went out to dinner before we hired him he said, he said he read the Four Steps and couldn’t wait to try this Customer Development stuff.”

“So what happened,” I asked, though I was betting I could finish the conversation for him (since I had made the same mistake.) “Well, he’s completely lost at the job. When we ask him to call on a different group of customers all he wants to do is call on the people already in his rolodex. When a customer throws us out he wants to get on to the next sales call and I want to talk about why we failed. He says great sales people don’t do that, they just keep selling. Every time we iterate even a small part of our business model or product he gets upset. When we change the company presentation it takes him days to get up to speed to the smallest change. He’s finally told us we got to stop changing everything or else he can’t sell. He was supposed to be a great VP of Sales. I’m probably going to fire him and start a search for another one, but what do I do wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, “You got what you asked for. But you didn’t get what you need. The problem isn’t his, it’s yours. You didn’t need a VP of Sales, you needed something very different.

Companies Have Titles to Execute a Known Business Model
I offered that in an existing company job titles reflect the way tasks are organized to execute a known business model. For example, the role of “Sales” in an existing company means that:

  1. there’s a sales team executing
  2. a repeatable and scalable business model
  3. selling a known product to
  4. a well-understood group of customers
  5. using a standard corporate presentation
  6. with an existing price-list and
  7. standard terms, conditions and contract

Therefore the job title “Sales” in an existing company is all about execution around a series of “knowns.”

We Use the Same Title For Two Very Different Jobs
I asked Rajiv to go through this checklist.  Did he have a repeatable and scalable business model?  “No.”  Did he have a well understood group of customers? “No.”  Did he have a standard corporate presentation? “No.” etc. Did he and his recruiter say any of this when they put together the job spec or interviewed candidates?  “No.”

Then why was he surprised the executive he hired wasn’t a fit.

Startups Need Different Titles to Search For an Unknown Business Model
 In a startup you need executives whose skills are 180 degrees different from what defines success in an existing company.  A startup wants execs comfortable in chaos and change – with presentations changing daily, with the product changing daily, talking and with analyzing failure rather than high-fiving a success.  In short you are looking for the rare breed:

  1. comfortable with learning and discovery
  2. trying to search for a repeatable and scalable business model
  3. agile enough to deal with daily change, operating “without a map”
  4. with the self-confidence to celebrate failure when it leads to iteration and Pivots

That means the function called Sales used in a large company (and the title that goes with it, “VP of Sales”) don’t make sense in a startup searching for a business model. Sales implies “execution,” but that mindset impedes (majorly screws-up) progress in searching for a business model. Therefore we need a different job function, job title and different type of person. They would be responsible for Customer Validation and finding Pivots and searching around a series of unknowns. And they would look nothing like his failed VP of Sales.

I suggested to Rajiv his problem was pretty simple. Since he hadn’t yet found a repeatable and scalable business model, his startup did not need a “VP of Sales.” The early hire he needed to help him run Customer Validation and Pivots has a very different skill set and job spec. What Rajiv needed to hire was a VP of Customer Development and part ways with his VP of Sales.

I suggested he chat with his investors and see if they agreed.  “I hope they don’t make me hire another “experienced” VP of Sales,” he said as left.

Lessons Learned

  • Companies have titles which reflect execution of known business models
  • Early stage startups are still searching for their business model
  • Individuals that excel at execution of a process rarely excel in chaotic environments
  • We burn through early VP’s in startups because the job functions we are hiring for are radically different, but we are using the same titles.
  • Startups need to use different titles to indicate that the search for a business model requires different skills than executing a business model.

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Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 49 Comments »

Why Product Managers Wear Sneakers

Posted on September 2, 2010 by steveblank

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association.  It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example of an industry cluster.)

The published title of the talk was, “How to Create a $100M Business and Out Innovate your Competition.”  I read that and thought, “If I knew how to do that I would have been a VC.”  So instead I gave a talk I called, “Why Product Managers Need Sneakers.”

The gist of the talk was to observe that:

  1. startups are not smaller versions of large companies
  2. startups search for a business model, large companies execute an existing one
  3. the skills that talented product managers bring to a large company are at best not transferable to a startup (and at worst destructive)
  4. product managers in a startup can either be an asset or an albatross.
  5. They’re an albatross if they perform as they do in a large company, and believe that they “own” customer interaction, feedback to engineering and authoring market requirements documents.
  6. They’re an asset to a startup if they understand that their job is to get the founder outside the building and in front of customers.
  7. They can be the scorekeepers in Customer Discovery and Validation as the company iterates and pivots the business model and refines the minimum feature set.

“Why Product Managers Wear Sneakers” was a reference to the amount of running around outside the building (with the founder) product managers will need to do in a startup. Except they won’t be called Product Managers. In a startup they will be part of the Customer Development team.

If you’ve seen my talks before you can skip forward to slide 19.

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Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 22 Comments »

Solving the Innovator’s Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

Posted on August 23, 2010 by steveblank

One of the ways I learn is to teach. My students ask questions I can’t answer and challenge me to solve problems I never considered. At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast.

My last session was with a passionate, smart, entrepreneurial team from a Fortune 100 company. (And if I told you who they were I’d have to kill you.) Their copies of the Four Steps were dog-eared and marked with sticky notes. We spent two days of analyzing and exploring their customer discovery visits just completed across South America, Africa and Asia. Learning which hypotheses survived these visits were eye-openers for all of us. We used what they learned to plan their next steps for additional Discovery, and ultimately Customer Validation.

It reminded me of the differences in Customer Discovery between a scalable startup and a big company. Here’s what we observed:

It’s Easier for Big Companies to Get Meetings – But It’s Not Always a Blessing
When a big company calls prospective customers to set up Discovery meetings, their datebook fills up fast. Execs at higher levels than you’d expect join the meeting eager to hear what the big company has to say about their industry. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the meetings become far more formal and more crowded, than one that a startup would have. This crowd actually dampens the opportunity for learning. Since the meetings attract senior execs everyone around the table waits for the big boss to speak and follows his or her lead. This stifles or shuts down the important “outlier” conversations that drive pivots and iterations in the discovery process.

Solution: try to get a blend of one-on-one meetings along with the group session. And be sure to set expectations for the meeting before it happens.

We’re Not Here for a Sales Call
If someone from a large company is flying halfway around the world to visit your company, your presumption is they have something to sell you. Crucial in the Customer Discovery process is not selling…it’s listening. The exploring, probing, gaining reactions is why you’re there. (Of course, if someone forces a purchase order on you and you reject it, you’ve just failed miserably at entrepreneurship.)  Disabusing the audience of the notion that the visit is a sales call is vital to the customer discovery mission. Followers of the Customer Development process know that you can’t start selling until you have transformed product, customer and other hypotheses into a validated business model and sales roadmap. (Short-circuiting that process is a major “foul” that often leads to premature business models and suboptimal sales results.)

To potential customers who’ve never been asked for their opinion before, the purpose of a Discovery meeting can be confusing. There are business cultures where the vendor/customer interactions are limited to “here’s what I have to sell, do you want to buy it.”

Solution: spend more time on the “setup” for the meeting. Tell potential customers before you meet, “We’re working on an interesting product and we’d be happy to share where we are in exchange for some feedback. But we are not here for a sales call.”

Getting the Customer to Talk is Even More Challenging
There’s no more important skill in Customer Discovery than “good listening.” When a big company shows up, everyone expects an important formal presentation, which is hardly your Discovery mission at all.  Structuring the conversation in a way that elicits feedback before you reveal the product hypothesis is essential to getting honest reactions, good or bad. Yet just reading your questions from a list is a real-turnoff. Insert them casually into a conversation and don’t try too hard to get every one of them answered in every meeting.

Solution: One of our favorite hints, from a great post by ash maurya, is to pose problems to the group in a randomized list. “We see these three problems in your industry.  Do you agree?  Could you rank them in order of importance to you?”  This literally forces a discussion and prioritization and is repeatable again and again. “We believe the most important features you need in a supersonic transporter are….” or “Our research tells us that female consumers most want a, b, and c.”

Big Companies are Bred for Large Scale Success
When you’re doing disruptive innovation in a multi-billion dollar company, a $10Million dollar/year new product line doesn’t even move the needle. So to get new divisions launched large optimistic forecasts are the norm. Ironically, one of the greatest risks in large companies is high pressure expectations to make these first pass forecasts that subvert an honest Customer Development process. The temptation is to transform the vision of a large market into a solid corporate revenue forecast – before Customer Development even begins.

Solution: Upper management needs to understand that a new division pursuing disruptive innovation is not the same as a division adding a new version of an established product. Rather, it is a organization searching for a business model (inside a company that’s executing an existing one.) That means you may find that revenue appears later than the plan called for, or that there are no customers or fewer than the plan suggests.

Customer Development Without Agile Engineering Is A Plan For Failure
Beleving in Customer Development but still retaining waterfall development for engineering and manufacturing is a setup for problems if not outright failure. Even in a large company you can’t do Customer Development without aligning some part of engineering to respond to unexpected customer needs and findings.

Solution: Get engineering buy-in by. Make sure the engineering and manufacturing plans “before” Customer Development don’t look the same as “after” Customer Development.

Spend your Way to Success Usually Results in the Opposite
Ironically large revenue goals may lead to largesse in overfunding the new division, with the implicit assumption that dollars can “buy your way to success.” All the money in the world doesn’t negate the painful search for a business model, or the lack of a scalable/profitable one. And new divisions in large companies operate just like startups who get overfunded – somehow their expense budgets always equal at least their funding.

Solution: Eight and nine digit funding before Customer Discovery is a curse not a blessing. Take the money in tranches (equivalent to VC “rounds”) predicated on milestones in finding a repeatable and scalable business model.

There’s an Overhead Cost to Being an Entrepreneur in a big, established corporation
Large companies are just plain organized – with rules, HR, finance and more importantly, are built around process and procedures for execution. It’s why so few big companies succeed at true entrepreneurship.

Solution: Assume as a given that as a new division head at least 15% of your time will be spent managing up and protecting down. Few in your own company will understand what you’re up to.

Lessons Learned

  • Customer Development in large companies has it’s own unique challenges
  • Some parts of being a big company make it easier, others make being a startup even riskier

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