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. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching, Venture Capital | 19 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This last post – part nine – highlights the final team presentations. Parts one through eight, the class lectures, are here, Guide for our mentors is here. Syllabus is here. This is the End Class lectures were over last week, but [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 13 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post – part eight – was the last formal lecture. Parts one through seven of the lectures are here, Syllabus is here. While this is the last lecture, the teams still have one more week to work on their companies, [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 5 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With one week and one more updates to go, this post is part seven. Parts one through six are here, Syllabus is here. With a week to go the teams are starting to look like opening night before the big play. [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 3 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With two weeks and two more updates to go, this post is part six. Parts one through five are here, Syllabus is here. While we’ve been pushing hard on the teams, this week the teaching team was about to get its [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 4 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part five. Parts one through four are here, Syllabus is here. Week 5 of the class. Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Customers (who are the users, payers, buyers, etc.) This week they were [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 3 Comments »
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 | 22 Comments »
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part four. Part one is here, two is here and three is here. Syllabus is here. Week 4 of the class. Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) This [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 8 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 | 12 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 | 12 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 | 40 Comments »
Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship? I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr, (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford,) where they are set [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Teaching, Venture Capital | 8 Comments »
I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. They are going to get out of the building, build a company and get orders in ten weeks. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 53 Comments »
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) and being continually surprised when it didn’t. That’s the definition of insanity. Luckily most startups now realize there is a better [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 11 Comments »
In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. Alexander Osterwalder, who authored the Business Model Generation book, put together a slidedeck on his [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development | 13 Comments »
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