Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 31: Congressmen Dan Lipinski and Seth Moulton

Posted on May 30, 2016 by steve blank

Lean methodologies have changed the way science is commercialized in the U.S. Now it is changing how we protect the homeland and keep Americans safe and around the world.

How the U.S. government has embraced Lean methodologies to reinvigorate its innovation efforts was the focus of the latest episode of my SiriusXM radio show, Entrepreneurs are Everywhere.

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). It follows the journeys of innovators sharing what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.

Dan Lipinski

Rep. Dan Lipinski

Joining me in the Stanford University studio were

Seth Moulton

Rep. Seth Moulton

Listen to the full interviews with Reps. Moulton and Lipinski by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here.

(And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interview are below.

Rep. Dan Lipinski is a six-term Congressman and on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology and Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Research and Technology (and one of a handful with a doctorate).  He championed the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps). I-Corps teaches scientists and engineers how to get their technical ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace using the Lean Startup processes.

Rep. Lipinski also serves on the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, and three of its subcommittees: Aviation; Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials; and Highways and Transit.

Innovation drives the U.S. economy, he said: 

Innovation is really is the life blood of our American economy. … looking back at the stories of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers, you look at emergence to technology innovation and what it has done for our economy.

We need to continue that. America is full of entrepreneurs, inventor and dreamers.

Coming back to Stanford, reminds me of a German friend when I was here in grad school  It was 1989. He saw the movie, “Field of Dreams.” I asked him what he thought about the movie and he said, “Well, that would never happen in Germany. In Germany, you’d never have some guy with a crazy idea, who’d plow under his field so he can build something like a ball park.” He said, “You just would not. No one in Germany would ever believe that story but in America, things are different. Americans are dreamers. They’re doers.”

I think that’s why we are so good at innovation. We’re risk-takers.

Unfortunately it seems in this presidential election, we’re in a place where we have candidates who instead of growing the pie through innovation, are talking about “How are we going to divide the existing pie differently?” … what we really need to do is to help innovators grow the pie. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

He offered context for the government’s innovation efforts:

The Federal Government plays a critical role in innovation in our country and has throughout our history. If you’re listening to this show on satellite radio, satellite radio was pioneered by the Department of Defense and NASA. If you’re listening on the Internet, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the NSF (The National Science Foundation) were critical in developing the internet.

Most people don’t know the role that the government has played and continues to play funding most of the country’s technology and medical research. That research is the building block to innovative products. It’s the envy of the world.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Rep. Seth Moulton is a Harvard graduate and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served four tours in Iraq, including two tours as a platoon commander and two tours as a Special Assistant to Gen. David Petraeus. He was elected to Congress in 2014 and serves on the House Armed Services Committee, the House Budget Committee and the House Small Business Committee.

He spoke about the efforts of the Department of Defense to connect the Defense and Intelligence communities with the Silicon Valley innovation mindset, with their first innovation outpost called DIUx:

Connecting to the Silicon Valley innovation culture is another way to make sure that we’re doing as much as we can to protect their lives of our soldiers as they’re putting their lives on the line for our country.  

He acknowledged the role that the new Hacking for Defense class is playing:

There’s a lot of technologies that could save American lives overseas if we could just get them to the troops and get them more quickly. It’s also a great way for people around the country, whether it’s in Cambridge, Mass., or out here in California, to contribute in the fight against terrorism, to help the young men and women who are out there putting their lives on the line for us. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

The Cold War spurred innovation, Moulton said: 

Rep. Moulton: There was a time in the 1950s and ’60s, when the latest and greatest technology was coming out of the Department of Defense. Then later our advanced technology came from the civilian sector. That’s why we had the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles and bombers and other things that we built during the cold war. 

Today, innovation isn’t happening at the big defense contractors as much as it’s happening right here in Silicon Valley. We’ve got to change them all.

Steve:  The Department of Defense and House Armed Services Committee helped start a  innovation outpost out here called DIUx, didn’t they?

Rep. Moulton: That’s right. It was a recognition in Washington’s that we ought to have better connections out here. This is one of the reasons why I come to visit. Not just because I’m on the Armed Services Committee but because I’m one of the youngest members of congress and I’m one of the only member of congress who has a degree in science. I like to think that I can understand this stuff, at least better than some of my colleagues. It’s important that we have these connections between Washington and the innovation that’s going on out here.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

As a former Marine, he has first-hand experience with the need to speed defense innovation efforts:

I remember when my GPS mapping system in my Humvee broke down when I was over in Iraq. We had to take it to the base to get reloaded and they brought out a stack of 3 ½-inch disks. A lot of listeners probably don’t even remember what those are.

It was an amazing system … in the late ’80s or ’90s or whatever, but now it’s really out of date. The Department of Defense just hasn’t been able to keep up with the pace of innovation. We would have been a lot better off with iPhones in our Humvees at the time.

We’ve got a lot of work to do on faster integration of innovation inside the Department of Defense. This is something that the committee right now is focused on, including the Republican chairman Mac Thornberry who’s a great chairman, very bi-partisan. One of his priorities is to reform the procurement processes at the Department of Defense so that we can take advantage of all this incredible innovation that’s going on right here at home.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

He’s also committed to improving the Veterans Administration to better serve veterans’ healthcare needs, he said:

Rep. Moulton: We have a number of bills that we’re working on. The most recent is called the Faster Care for Veterans Act, which directs the VA to conduct a pilot program with existing applications to make appointments on your Smart Phone. 

We all know the stories of veterans who wait in line for months trying to get an appointment. It’s also a problem with waiting in line on the phone to try to get through to schedule an appointment. That’s what someone in my office who’s a veteran was trying to do one day, and he kept, he got in this infinite loop on their phone system: Press 6. Press 2. Press 3. OK, back to the beginning. Press 6. Press 3. Press 2. Someone else in the office just made a video of it, and it went viral on Facebook.

This Faster Care for Veterans Act is totally bipartisan. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the leaders in the Republican Conference, is cosponsoring it with me, and it’s gotten a lot of support. My bottom line is this: Our veterans deserve the best healthcare in the world. If there’s technology that’s available to folks in the private sector right now, it should be available to veterans as well.

Steve:  Is the problem with these institutions leadership, technology, bureaucracy that has no incentives to change, all of the above?  

Rep. Moulton: It’s all of the above, but I’ll tell you, from my background in the Marines, I think a lot of it does come down to leadership. The leadership is starting to change. The new Secretary of the VA comes from the private sector. He’s a veteran, but his experience is really in corporate America, and he’s quickening the pace of innovation at the VA. So that’s an example of a place where it’s starting to change, but this is also why we need innovators in government.

The government does a lot of important things and so many people are just frustrated with politics today, especially with the presidential election, that they’re just checking out. Actually, this is the time when people need to check in, and especially young people.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Rep. Moulton said he is inspired by the culture change he’s seen during his short tenure in government:

Rep. Moulton: I like seeing new young people come into government and give some of the old bureaucrats a run for their money. We’ve got to improve the personnel system to give more opportunities to you young people, but I spend a lot of time as one of the youngest members of Congress just trying to get other young people involved. For some, it means potentially running some day, for others it means working on a congressional staff or just doing something else in government where you can be an important contributor to fixing some of the problems in government. … 

Steve: You’ve now been in the world largest bureaucracies, US military and probably the biggest bureaucracy in terms of spending, the US Congress. What still gives you hope?

Rep. Moulton: I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the impact that a freshman can make. I run my office like startup. I got my chief of staff from Silicon Valley. We’re just trying to think outside the box and do things differently and we run into bureaucratic obstacles every single day but we don’t let them stop us. Just in my own little personal experience over the past year, I’ve seen the difference that innovators, than an entrepreneurial spirit can make in government.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

Among the ways the government fosters an entrepreneurial spirit is by helping to commercialize scientific research, Rep. Lipinski said:

Rep. Lipinski: Not all research is going to be turned into some new innovation, but there are some things that can be, and that haven’t been, and I think the federal government has a proper role to play in doing that.  

At the Department of Energy I pushed them to create an Office of Technology Transition at the Office of Science so that they can centralize their commercialization activities.

I also was part of helping create the Technology Commercialization Fund created in 2005 to help get research out of labs and into creation of new products.  The third thing at the Department of Energy is Lab Corps which is a … version of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

The NSF I-Corps is the biggest example of this effort, Rep. Lipinski said. To date, more than 800 teams of scientists and engineers have gone through the program which is built on the Lean LaunchPad curriculum.

I don’t have a background as an entrepreneur. It’s not something that’s in my blood so I honestly had never really thought to myself, “If I had an idea, how would I go about trying to do something with that idea?”

Your Lean LaunchPad class, which became the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, made complete sense to me, to my engineer mind.

You have an idea but before you say, “I’m just going to launch myself full-force into it,” you must find out, “Does this idea make sense to customers? Do people really want this product?” Maybe they want something a little bit different. You need to get out of the lab to figure that out. …

As someone who was a university professor, I know what some professors are like. These are extremely intelligent people, but they spend all their time in the lab. You really don’t know until you get out and you ask questions, and find out what are people really looking for.

The idea of taking a professor, a graduate student working under the professor and they get together with an entrepreneur — someone who has the experience — and work as a team, going through the whole Customer Development and Lean Startup process … just made complete sense to me and I thought everyone would see that. I thought there was no question.

This is so obvious. First of all, I don’t know why no one came up with this before, and once people hear this they’re going to feel like I feel: This is such a great idea, we’ve got to do everything we can to promote this and spread this. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

But while the idea was a no-brainer to Rep. Lipinski, he had to convince others on Capitol Hill to support the program:

Well first of all I got a lot of pushback on the Science Committee. Questions about “Well, should we be choosing winners and losers here?”

A lot of members, mostly Republicans — OK all Republicans — would say, “Solyndra. Remember Solyndra? Remember that our government put all that money into this solar company and it went under, so why are we going to pick winners and losers like this? That’s something the market should do.”

The other thing was, “Well, the National Science Foundation should not be doing this. The National Science Foundation should just be doing basic research. This is not an area the NSF should be in.”

Although if you go back to the original charter of the NSF it clearly lays out that it is something that they should be in. I said, “Look, this is about education. NSF certainly is about education, what we’re doing is educating professors and graduate students about how to be an entrepreneur.”

I still could not get a hearing on the Innovation Corps. … This is the way politics works: 

I was the top Democrat on the Research and Technology subcommittee. Mo Brooks, the Republican chair of the subcommittee, said to me, “I want to have a hearing in my district. If you come to my district for a hearing I’ll come to your district and do a hearing and you can pick whatever topic you want.” So I said OK.

We went down to Huntsville, Ala., he did something with local educators about science education and I said “OK, I want to have a hearing in Chicago. It actually has nothing to do with anything locally,” but this was my chance finally to say “I’m going to bring Steve Blank in and others from the NSF and we’re going to talk about the Innovation Corps.” That was the first hearing.

I tell you, things have certainly turned around since then and I think the Innovation Corps has really been embraced in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill by both sides of the aisle.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

The program has had a tremendous impact, he added:

There aren’t that many things that get done in Washington these days, not many things, especially, that really work. I tell you that day that I came out to Stanford, and sat in on your class, met with you, talked with you, I came out of there thinking this is just an incredible idea.  

After the NSF I-Corps had been running for a while I visited and heard the presentations from the I-Corps teams and then saw companies developing from those ideas, venture capital coming to some of these companies that were being formed, I realized this is something that it really works and it’s something that I championed that was right – and good for the country.

The NSF I-Corps is a great idea, something the government needs to really continue to invest in, and I’m very proud of this maybe more than anything else that I’ve been a part of in the 12 years that I’ve been in Congress because it’s working and making a difference.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Reps. Lipinski and Moulton by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Evangelos Simoudis, co-founder and managing director of Synapse Partners; and Ashok Srivastava, Verizon’s chief data scientist.

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. 

Want to be a guest on the show?  Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey.

Filed under: Customer Development, SiriusXM Radio Show | 2 Comments »

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Weeks 8 and 9

Posted on May 30, 2016 by steve blank

We just held our eighth and ninth weeks of the Hacking for Defense class. Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), the teams spent the last two weeks learning what activities, resources and partners they would need to actually deliver their solution. And they’re getting a handle on what it costs to build a company to deliver it.

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas (activities, resources, partners, and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”

(This post is a continuation of the series. See all the H4D posts here. Because of the embedded presentations this post is best viewed on the website.)

Next week the teams will present their final Lessons Learned presentations.

Two Items for the Bucket List
Two bucket list items got ahead of my blogging so I’ve combined the final two lecture weeks of the class into this one blog post.

Four decades ago my first job in Silicon Valley was with ESL, the first company to combine computers and signals intelligence. The founder of this 1964 Silicon Valley startup was Bill Perry. His work at ESL made him one of the 10 founders of National Reconnaissance.

Dr. Perry eventually became the 19th secretary of defense. But a decade earlier as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, he was the father of the second offset strategy using software and semiconductors to build smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth aircraft that helped end the Cold War.

Last week I interviewed Bill at Stanford about War and Peace, innovation and entrepreneurship.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/4255/Dedication-to-Innovation-and-Nation-Entire-Talk

Second:
I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here.

The Left side of the Canvas
If you’ve been reading along so far, you know that this class is not an extended hackathon nor is it a 10-week long incubator. Hackathons and incubators are helpful in getting product teams focused and result in great demos, but you’re left still not knowing whether you have something beneficiaries/stakeholders/users want nor do you know what it takes to deploy the solution to the field. Ultimately you are left without a strategy to turn your idea into a solution that people will use.

Using the Lean LaunchPad methodology our teams do much more than just build a product or understand customer problems/needs. They also learn how to deploy the solution, how to get stakeholder buy-in and how to measure success. And in these last two weeks of class, they learn what activities, resources and partners they’ll need to deliver their solution and derive what it costs to build the company to deliver it.

The teams capture their work in the mission model canvas a framework for each week’s activities. The canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that new ventures face. The 9 boxes of the canvas visualize all the components needed to turn beneficiaries needs/problems into a solution.

Mission Model Canvas by week
Each week the teams marched through another box of the canvas, testing their hypotheses in front of beneficiaries using the customer development methodology, all while building and updating their minimal viable product. It’s a ton of work. Over the course of the class, each team will have talked to 100 beneficiaries/ stakeholders/ users. The result is evidence-based entrepreneurship.

Team Presentations: Weeks 8 and 9
Over these last two weeks, teams began to figure out the activities, resources and partners their company would need to deliver their value proposition (product, service or both) to the beneficiaries in their sponsor organizations.

Activities are the expertise and resources that the company needs to deliver the value proposition. They might be hardware development, software expertise, manufacturing, launching rockets, funding, etc. Resources are the internal company-owned activities. Examples are a company-owned manufacturing facility, big data or machine learning engineers, DOD proposal writers, venture capital, etc.  Partners are the external resources (third parties) necessary to execute the Activities. i.e. outsourced manufacturing, system integrators, etc. other companies, that will provide those activities.

activities resources and partners

In addition, teams worked on understanding the costs and operations and deployment timelines for delivering the product to their sponsor.

finance and ops timeline

Team Dynamics
In these last three weeks the benefit of having a team of mixed business and technical resources becomes apparent. Teams that are just all technologists quickly grasp product/market fit (the right side of the canvas) but often have a hard time understanding the left side of the canvas (activities, resources, partners and costs.)  When the technologists work together with business focused students as a team, the learning is impressive.

However, the downside is that one of failure modes of teams (and startups) is a team that doesn’t jell. One of the symptoms is technologists going heads-down building product and features without customer input while they defer all of the left-side of the canvas to the business team. Or conversely business team members draw timelines and costs without a deep understanding of the technology hurdles.

Almost every class has a team or two that goes through team conflict – different working styles, different time commitments, pivots taking them to places where they’re no longer interested, etc. Given that 1/4 of startups meltdown over team dynamics before funding, seeing this happen to teams in the class isn’t a surprise. We treat team dynamics as a normal part of learning in the class. (Team members get to grade each other on their contributions as part of their final grade.)

Considering that none of these teams have worked together in the past, the amount of synergy and teamwork in this cohort is impressive.

Skynet

WEEK 8 Presentation

In slide 2 the Skynet team continued with customer discovery using experiments to validate or invalidate their hypotheses. Slide 5 does a good job of separating out their technical versus business activities. Slide 6 did a great job in connecting the activities to the resources and partners they’ll need.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

In Slide 2 the team made progress on developing their MVP. In slide 3 they realized some of their conclusions about DARPA partnerships from last week were wrong. Slides 5-8 continued their learning about partnerships, and slides 9-11 are a great first pass on costs and financial and operations timeline.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Aqualink

WEEK 8 Presentation

Slide 5 is a good summary of activities/resources/partners. Slide 6 connects those to the prototyping and deployment activities by partner and sponsor. Slide 7 lays out a potential field deployment schedule to the sponsor organization. Slides 11-14 show their continued testing of their MVP underwater.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slides 7 and 9 is the team’s first pass in understanding costs, operations and fundraising. They continued their MVP development underwater in a pool at Stanford.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Sentinel

WEEK 8 Presentation

The team really got out of the building and traveled to San Diego (at their own expense) and visited the USS Sampson and the 3rd Fleet headquarters. Slide 7 summarizes their activities, resources and partners.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slide 13 is an excellent example of mapping out their costs.  Slide 14 is a great example of diagramming their financial and operating milestones.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Capella

WEEK 8 Presentation

This week Capella was so engaged in their customer discovery and pivot to illegal fishing, they missed the assignment.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slides 8 -12 illustrates their activities and costs. Because they missed last week’s assignment, you wouldn’t know from their presentation that they required a partnership with a space launch company 🙂  The good news is this team had been distracted and will have news to share in their Lessons Learned presentation

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Guardian

WEEK 8 Presentation

Slides 4 -6 summarized Guardians activities, resources and partners.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slides 4 -6 summarized their costs and operating plan.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Right of Boom

WEEK 8 Presentation

Slides 4 -6 summarized Right of Booms’ activities, resources and partners.

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slide 3-5 summarizes their unique findings. This team discovered that their deliverable to the sponsor will not be a product. Instead it will be a series of recommendations on how to better utilize their existing products and data. Slides 6-8 describe the partners which can best deliver these recommendations to their sponsor.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Narrative Mind

Slides 3 -6 summarized their activities, resources and partners

WEEK 8 Presentation

If you can’t see the week 8 presentation click here

WEEK 9 Presentation

Slides 3 -10 further refined their partners and summarized their costs and operating plan.

If you can’t see the week 9 presentation click here

Advanced Lecture 8: Costs
In week 8 Pete Newell gave the costs lecture and put it in the context of a DOD program. Slide 3 defined what costs were, slides 4-11 tied it to a specific example.

If you can’t see the costs lecture click here

Advanced Lecture 9: Reflections
In past versions of this class teams would call on beneficiaries/customers until the last week of the class and then present their Lessons Learned. The good news is that their presentations were dramatically better than those given at demo days – they showed us what they learned over 8 weeks which gave us a clear picture of the velocity and trajectory of the teams. The bad news is since their heads were down working on customer discovery until the very end, they had no time to reflect on the experience.

We realized that we had been so focused in packing content and work into the class, we failed to give the students time to step back and think about what they actually learned.

So now we use the last week of the class as a reflection week. Our goal—to have the students extract the insights and meaning from the work they had done in the previous seven weeks.

We asked each team to prepare a draft Lessons Learned presentation telling us about their journey and showing us their:

  • Initial sponsor problem statement
  • Quotes from beneficiaries that illustrated learnings and insights
  • Pivot stories
  • Screen shots of the evolution of Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  • Demo of final MVP

The teaching team reviewed the drafts and provided feedback to the teams and to the class as a whole. We discussed what general patterns and principles they extracted from all the customer interaction they had.

Dual-use Products
As you’ll see next week in the final presentations, some of the teams discovered that they could best serve their sponsor by building a commercial off-the-shelf product that could be sold widely and bought by the DOD/Intel community. Pete Newell came up with the best diagram I’ve seen to illustrate how the work the teams were doing in this class fit to do just that.

The diagram shows that during the class the sponsor needs drive customer discovery and product/market fit. But continued discovery would now include commercial customers and eventually those commercial customer needs would drive the feature set.

dual use trajectory

Hacking for Defense Educators Class
The H4D instructor team has been busy capturing what we learned (teams, lectures, sponsors, etc.) and we’ll incorporate the lessons from this inaugural course and revise the course materials. As part of our plan to scale this class nationwide to other schools, we’re writing an educator’s guide and offering a Hacking for Defense Educators Class Sept 7th – 9th.

Details in the next post.

Tomorrow, May 31st is the last day of class.

We’ll post the final presentations. Quite a journey for all these teams and their sponsors!

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Teaching | Leave a comment »

NYU Commencement Speech 2016

Posted on May 23, 2016 by steve blank

NYU Engineering Commencement Speech

Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. I’m honored to help you celebrate this important milestone.NYU commencement speech

If you can’t see the video click here

Your life is already full of milestones: Your first steps, your first kiss, passing a driving test, this graduation. And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker 🙂

In 33% of the commencement speeches this year, 2.8 million graduates are going to hear advice about “follow your own path.” Or “Learn from others”. Or the perennial favorite, “you can make a difference.”

All of this is great advice. In fact, I’m going to give you exactly the same advice. But in very few of these speeches does anyone let you in on why we’re telling you this with such passion and urgency.

So today as we celebrate your graduation I’m going to tell you why.

—–

When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school, that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, “teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom”. Since then I’ve had a series of interesting careers: technician in the Air Force, tech writer, marketer, entrepreneur, CEO and now educator and mentor.

But this idea has never been far from my mind: That most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day – we won’t.

That means you have about 21,000 days left –  and about 14,000 of them for your career.  So herein lies the urgency.

In every startup I did, every new course I created, and everything I’ve taught, the phrase “make every day count” took on new meaning when I knew how many were left.

So how do you live a life making the most of each day?

That’s the challenge we all face – and we all make different choices on how we do it. But this morning I’d like to share three short stories – about how I made my days count and gained some wisdom from others.

­_________

So my first story is about Taking Risks and Pushing Boundaries

As you enter the working world, you’ll hear things like, “That’s not how we do things here.”  “It’s never been done that way before.”  and “The rules say you can’t do this.”

Some of these rules will keep you from killing yourself on the job. Some are required for you to gain the skills to perform your job. But most everything else people will tell you about rules is wrong.  Not kind of wrong, but spectacularly wrong. It’s ironic because ignoring the rules is what drives innovation and invention. While most visionaries turn out to be hallucinating, the few who are right push the human race further along.

Let me give you an example.

When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley. They thought I could tell good stories about what it was like to start a company. Soon I began to pester the head of the department about this new idea I had… that startups are not smaller versions of large companies.

Actually they’re entirely different.

Established businesses execute business models while startups search for them.

Yet everyone – investors, entrepreneurs, academics — expected new startups to follow the same practices that worked for large companies – write a business plan, forecast 5-year sales projections and build the product without ever talking to customers.

I was a lone voice inside one of the country’s leading business schools challenging the conventional wisdom of the last 40 years, proposing that everything we were teaching about starting companies was wrong.

I can’t tell you the number of very smart professors and venture capitalists who laughed in my face. But I didn’t give up.  Because I knew the clock was running and I was determined to make every day count.

I saw something that they didn’t and to their credit…Berkeley’s Business School and then Stanford’s Engineering School let me write and teach a new course based on my ideas.

Five years later the U.S. National Science Foundation adopted this class, now called the Innovation Corps, as the basis of commercializing science in the Unites States. This unorthodox idea has become a movement …called The Lean Startup –  and has led to entirely new ways to start companies, commercialize science, and think about innovation.

How did this happen?  Innovation comes from those who see things that others don’t. It comes from people who not only question the status quo –  But keep persisting in the face of all the naysayers.

Because your time here is limited.

­_________

My second story is about Mentors and gaining the heart of the wisdom

Questioning dogma doesn’t mean rejecting all advice and guidance from others who’ve come before you.

In fact, your career and life can take on a very different trajectory if you find mentors and use that time to learn from their experience.

As an entrepreneur in my 20’s and 30’s, I was lucky to have two extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field. One, Ben Wegbreit taught me how to think – Ben reviewed my first datasheet and returned it with entire paragraphs circled in red labeled “CFP” – I finally got enough nerve to ask him what CFP meant and he said, “Content Free Paragraph”. While Ben taught me how to think, Gordon Bell taught me what to think about. Gordon had the uncanny ability to see the future trajectory of computer and chip technology way before I even understood the problem.

I had no idea I was being mentored and never asked for it. But I sought out these really smart people, because I wanted to know what they knew.

In hindsight I realize that what made these brilliant engineers put up with me was that I was giving as good as I was getting. While I was learning from them – and their years of experience and expertise – what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking.

In hindsight I realize now that mentorship is a two-way street.

Finding a mentor can change your life – this is where you can gain a heart of wisdom.

So if someone takes an interest in your work and career, be open to their advice.  And think about what you can bring to the relationship.

Teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.

­_________

My last story is about serendipity and making the days count

Some of you may think you have a clear sense of where your career is headed.  Others of you may still have no idea. But either way, while the days count down, none of you should be worrying about what you will be doing 10 or 20 years from now. Because none of it will happen as you expect.

While your education has prepared you to master the facts, the other half of your brain needs to learn to trust in serendipity. By the way, the engineering definition of serendipity is, that life is too unpredictable to pre-compute. Serendipity is when it all comes together and you put all the days of your life into what becomes that of heart of wisdom.

Here’s the latest way Serendipity changed my life.

Over the last decade I’ve watched the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurship take off. The National Science Foundation adopted it.  The Lean LaunchPad class is now taught around the world – and VC’s expect entrepreneurs to talk about not just their technology but their customer development findings.

It was amazing to see the movement I started grow and thrive.

Just recently serendipity sent me down a new road that connected dots from 40 years ago to today.

When I was 18 I served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War.

After hanging up my uniform I had little interaction with the military until four decades later, when a group in the Department of Defense invited me to give a talk about Lean methods. Shortly after that, I met Pete Newell, the retired head of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force – one of the best Lean and agile organizations in the military – and I met Joe Felter an ex Special Forces Colonel. As I spent time with Pete, Joe and the Department of Defense, two things struck me –

Serendipity had just brought together my military experience of 40 years ago and the tools and techniques I spent the last decade building for Lean Startups.

I asked: What if we could teach students how use Lean methods to solve the most challenging national security problems? A new class – Hacking for Defense – was born.

Together with Pete and Joe and support from many others, we just taught this class for the first time – and hopefully will soon teach it here.

We plan to scale the class across the country and create a new opportunity for students to engage in national service—solving problems to keep Americans safe at home and abroad.

How did this happen?  Showing up a lot, and being open to new seemingly unconnected experiences, helped me create something that never existed before.

—

For me, knowing I was counting the days made me choose to work on things that pushed boundaries and made us collectively smarter.

So what do these stories mean for you?

  1. Take risks and push boundaries
  2. Learn from wise people who may know more than you do
  3. And let serendipity happen.

—

Of course only you can decide what you will do with the 14,000 days in your career.

But as engineers trained here at NYU you have a distinct advantage. As graduates you’ve been given the tools to design and build things to help people live better lives. You can solve major challenges the world faces.  You can create something that never existed.

Congratulations class of 2016.

My challenge to you – make every day ahead mean something.

Teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom

Make all the days of your life matter.

If you can’t see the clip, click here

Filed under: Commencement Speeches | 15 Comments »

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Week 7

Posted on May 16, 2016 by steve blank

We just held our seventh week of the Hacking for Defense class. Now with over 750 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.) almost all the teams are beginning to pivot from their original understanding of their sponsor’s problem and their hypotheses about how to solve them. Minimal viable products are being demo’d to sponsors and sponsors are reacting to what the teams are learning. This week teams figured out how to measure mission achievement and success, and our advanced lectures were on activities, resources and partners.

(This post is a continuation of the series. See all the H4D posts here. Because of the embedded presentations this post is best viewed on the website.)

—-

Why Innovation in Government Is Hard
As we spend more time with the military services, commands and agencies it’s apparent that getting disruptive innovation implemented in the DOD/IC face the same barriers as large corporations (and a few more uniquely theirs.)

The first barrier to innovation is the Horizon 1 leadership conundrum. In corporations, the CEO and executives have risen through the ranks for their skill on executing existing programs/missions. The same is true in most DOD/IC organizations: leadership has been promoted through the ranks for their ability to execute existing programs/missions. By the time they reach the top, they are excellent managers of processes and procedures needed to deliver a consistent and repeatable execution of the current core mission (and typically excellent political players as well.)

These horizon 1 leaders are exactly who you want in place when the status quo prevails – and when competitors / adversaries react as per our playbook.

To these Horizon 1 leader’s, innovation is often considered an extension of what they already do today. In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. In the DOD/IC innovation is often more technology, more planes, more aircraft carriers, more satellites, etc.

This “more and better” approach works until they meet adversaries – state and non-state – who don’t follow our game plan – adversaries who use asymmetry to offset and degrade our technological or numerical advantages – roadside bombs, cyberattacks, hybrid warfare, anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), etc.

disruption by adversaries

History tells us that what gets you promoted in peacetime
causes you to lose in wartime.

When Horizon 1 leaders set up innovation groups the innovators at the bottom of the organization start cheering. Meanwhile the middle of the organization strangles every innovation initiative. Why? Most often four points of failure occur:

  1. Horizon 1 leaders tend to appoint people who they feel comfortable with – Horizon 1 or perhaps Horizon 2 managers. This results not in innovation, but in Innovation Theater – lots of coffee cups, press releases, incubators and false hopes, but no real disruptive changes. Horizon 3 organizations require Horizon 3 leadership (with Horizon 1 second in command.)
  2. There needs to be effective communication about what being innovative means to different parts of their organizations as well as defining (and enforcing) their expectations for middle management. How do middle mangers know how to make trade-offs between the efficiency requirements of their Horizon 1 activities and the risks required of a Horizon 3 activity?
  3. They have to create incentives for middle management leaders to take on horizon three ideas
  4. They have to change the metrics across the entire organization. If not, then the effectiveness of the Horizon 3 effort will be graded using Horizon 1 metrics

Secretary of Defense Carter’s recent pivot to place the DOD’s innovation outpost – DIUx directly under his supervision after 8 months is a great example of a leader enforcing his expectations about innovation.

In peacetime Horizon 3/disruptive groups need to be led by Mavericks, sponsored and protected by Horizon 1 leadership. It is this group, challenging the dogma of the existing programs, who will come up with the disruptive/asymmetric offset technologies and strategies.

both types of leadership 2

BTW, history tells us that in war time the winners filled this innovation role with people who make most Horizon 1 leaders very uncomfortable – Churchill in WWII, Billy Mitchell, Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush at the OSRD, John Boyd, etc.

More next week on innovation and the intransigent middle. Now back to the class. 

Team Presentations: Week 7
In a company you know you’ve been successful when you generate revenue and profit. But in the military success has different metrics. This week the teams’ assignment was to understand what Mission Achievement and/or Mission Success looked like for each of their sponsor organizations and each of the beneficiaries inside that organization.

Later in the class some of the team will realize they can build “dual-use” products (building their product primarily for civilian use but also sold to the military.) In those case revenue will become an additional metric.

Understanding how to measure mission achievement/success for each beneficiary is the difference between a demo and a deployed solution.

Sentinel initially started by trying to use low-cost sensors to monitor surface ships for their 7th fleet sponsor in a A2/AD environment. The team pivoted and has found that their mission value is really to enable rapid, well-informed decisions by establishing a common maritime picture from heterogeneous data.

Sentinel displayOn Slide 4-5 the team continues testing their hypotheses via customer discovery. Note that they plan a trip to San Diego to visit the customer. And they realized that an unclassified proxy for their data is the IUU fishing problem. (With a great assist from the State Departments innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.) Their Minimum Viable Product can be seen on slides 12-16 using this illegal fishing data.

Slide 10 summarized what mission achievement would look like for three beneficiaries in the 7th fleet.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Capella Space started class believing that launching a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites into space to provide real-time radar imaging was their business. Now they’ve realized that the SAR data and analytics is the business.  Then the question was, “For whom?”

In slides 4- 11 they describe what they learned about illegal fishing in Indonesia (Thanks again to the State Departments innovation outpost.) But the big idea on slide 12 – 13 is that Capella has pivoted. The team realized that there are many countries that want to detect boats at night. And most of the countries of interest are located in the equatorial belt. Slide 14 is their rough outline of mission achievement for the key agencies/countries.

Interesting to note that Capella Space and Team Sentinel seem to be converging on the same problem space!

If you can’t see the presentation click here

NarrativeMind is developing tools that will optimize discovery and investigation of adversary communication trends on social media, allowing the U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) and others to efficiently respond and mitigate threats posed by enemy messaging.

In slide 4 the team provided a textbook definition of mission achievement. They specified what success looks like for each of the beneficiaries inside of their sponsor, ARCYBER. In slide 5 they broadly outlined mission achievement for three private sector markets.

In slides 6-9 they plotted all the potential adversary communication trends on social media problems, and in slide 7 overlaid that problem space with existing commercial solutions. Slides 8 and 9 show the problems not yet solved by anyone, and slide 9 further refines the specific problems this team will solve.

NarrativeMind further refined their Minimal Viable Product to product/market fit in Slides 11-16.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Aqualink started the class working to give Navy divers in the Naval Special Warfare Group a system of wearable devices that records data critical to diver health and safety and makes the data actionable through real-time alerts and post-dive analytics. A few weeks ago they pivoted, realizing that the high-value problem the divers want solved is underwater 3-D geolocation.

Slide 2, John Boyd and the OODA Loop (finally!) makes an appearance in the class. (The OODA loops and the four steps of Customer Development and the Lean Methodology are rooted in the same “get of the building/get eyes out of your cockpit” and “speed and urgency” concepts.) In Slides 5-7 Aqualink’s two versions of their Minimum Viable Product are beginning to be outlined and in Slide 8, the team passed around physical mockups of the buoy.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Guardian is trying to counter asymmetric threats from commercial drones for the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group.

The team certainly got out of the building this week. In between their classes they flew to the east coast and attended the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Drone Demo-Day at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. They spoke to lots of vendors and got a deep understanding of currently deployed tactical drones.

Slides 5-9 show their substantial progress in their Minimal Viable Product as they demo’d advanced detection and classification capabilities. They are beginning to consider whether they should pivot to become a drone software platform.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Right of Boom is trying to help foreign military explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams better accomplish their mission.  Now they are developing systems, workflows, and incentives for allied foreign militaries with the goal of improved intelligence fidelity.

This week the team was actually able to talk to a key beneficiary on the front lines overseas. What they discovered is that the JIDA current technical solutions, if combined, will provide a solution of equal quality to standalone development in a shorter timeframe.

On slide 4 they outlined their Mission Achievement / Success criteria for the key JIDA beneficiaries.  Slide 9 continued to refine their understanding of the tradespace.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Skynet is using drones to provide ground troops with situational awareness – helping prevent battlefield fatalities by pinpointing friendly and enemy positions.

Mission achievement on slide 2 needs a bit of explanation; the team has met and exceeded their basic goals to reach: 80% accuracy on target identification. From SOCOM’s perspective the team has achieved their initial mission. Now Skynet has moved beyond their original scope into an interesting area. Slide 9 and 10 show their further refinement of buy in- for SOCOM and the Border Patrol.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Advanced Lecture – Activities, Resources and Partners
Pete Newell presented the advanced lecture on Activities, Resources and Partners.

Activities are the expertise and resources that the company needs to deliver the value proposition. Resources are the internal company-owned activities. Examples are a company-owned manufacturing facility, big data or machine learning engineers, DOD proposal writers, venture capital, etc. Partners are the external resources necessary to execute the Activities. i.e. outsourced manufacturing, system integrators, etc.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Lessons Learned

  • History tells us that what gets you promoted in peacetime causes you to lose in wartime
  • Teams are making substantive pivots on their understanding of the real sponsor problem and pivoting on their proposed solution
  • Understanding how to measure mission achievement/success for each beneficiary is the difference between a demo and a deployed solution

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Teaching | Leave a comment »

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Week 6

Posted on May 12, 2016 by steve blank

We just held our sixth week of the Hacking for Defense class. Now with over 660 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.) the teams are getting deep into problem understanding and their minimal viable products are getting sophisticated enough to generate detailed customer feedback; we gave them advice on how to “stand and deliver” in class; and our advanced lecture explained how to find and measure mission achievement.

(This post is a continuation of the series. See all the H4D posts here. Because of the embedded presentations this post is best viewed on the website.)

Stand and Deliver: Preparing for Presentations
In other classes I’d normally check-in with students in the middle of the quarter / semester to hear any concerns. But in this class I don’t. Not because I don’t care, but because I know what response I’ll get in the middle of the quarter having insisted on an impossible pace while beating them with a stick. (In week 9 we’ll get the teams off the customer discovery treadmill and use that session for “reflection”. They’ll look back in awe at their own accomplishments.) This week, instead of a mid-class check-in, I give the Stand and Deliver presentation. In it I remind them what to do to prepare before each class session, tips on what to do when presenting in the class, and thoughts about opportunities after the class.

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

BTW, when I first starting teaching I noticed that teams picked the most articulate team members to give the weekly Lessons Learned presentation. And while that makes sense for a fund raising pitch, it’s the wrong model for a classroom – I want everyone to learn how to present. So each week we select a different team member to lead their team presentation. This means that even students whose first language isn’t English are up in front of the class presenting at least twice during the quarter.

Filling in the Gap: Advanced Lectures
Our advanced in-class lectures are designed to fill the knowledge gap between the on-line lectures and reading assigned for homework and the new realities of the Mission Model canvas and the DOD/IC as beneficiaries.

The goals of the weekly advanced lectures are:

  1. Define what specifically the teams need to accomplish outside of the building in the coming week to test their hypothesis for that specific part of the canvas
  2. Describe why the next part of the mission model canvas is important (to the user, organization, country, etc.)
  3. Offer specific examples of the deliverables we expect to see in their next week’s presentation as a result of their discovery

We can gauge how effective the lecture was when we see the team’s slides the next week. If the team presentations are all over the map, then our lectures were not effective. If the presentations across the teams are consistent then our lectures were on-target. This is a pretty quick way for us to tune our content.

This week some of the teams failed to present anything about last week’s buy-in lecture so it was a wakeup call that we needed to be more prescriptive in the lectures.

Pivots
A pivot is defined as a substantive change in one or more components of the mission model canvas (any of the 9 boxes). A pivot occurs after learning that your hypotheses about a specific part of the canvas are wrong. Often it’s a change in who’s the beneficiary / stakeholder / customer. Or it may be a change in the value proposition you’re delivering to those beneficiaries or it can be a substantive change in any of the 9 boxes of the canvas.

The two most important parts of a mission model canvas are the beneficiaries and the value proposition. The combination of these two is called “product/market fit.” If you’re not getting beneficiaries grabbing your value proposition out of your hands, you don’t have product/market fit.

While this sounds simple, as the teams are discovering this week, you don’t get a memo that says your hypotheses are wrong. At first you just get ambiguous data. You think hmm, perhaps I just need to talk to more people or the “right” people or just tweak the feature set. After a while you begin to realize your assumptions are incorrect, (or in this class, it’s even possible that the sponsor’s assumptions were incorrect.) It feels depressing and confusing. Finally, it dawns on you that it’s time to consider a pivot. A pivot is the lean methodology’s way to fire the plan without firing people. Pivots are what allows startups to be agile, and to move with speed and urgency.

In an actual startup, trying to complete the rest of the mission model canvas if you don’t have product/market fit is just going through the motions. Yet for the purpose of the class (versus an incubator) we do just that – we keep marching the teams through each canvas component because we want to teach them about all nine parts of the canvas. This creates cognitive dissonance for the teams – on purpose. Even though they are focused on learning about the next part of the canvas, every team continues to tenaciously search for that fit. (If we would insist they do it, it would feel like extra assigned work. When they do it on their own, it’s because it’s an obsession to solve the problem.)

This week we are seeing the typical class distribution. Several teams are in the despair, depressed and confused stage, a few are coming to the realization that it’s time to pivot, and others think they have product/market fit. It’s all part of the class. They and you will be surprised where the teams end up by the end of the class.

Team Presentations: Week 6
This week the teams’ assignment was to understand how to get “buy-in” inside their sponsors’ agency: specifically, how do they “get, keep and grow” their product inside their sponsors’ agency/command from initial interest all the way through expansion.

Aqualink started the class working to give Navy divers a system of wearable devices that records data critical to diver health and safety and makes the data actionable through real-time alerts and post-dive analytics. Now they understand that the problem the divers want solved is underwater 3-D geolocation.

Week6_H4D_Aqualink buyinSlides 3-11 are a good example of what is required to go from initial Buy-in to scale in the sponsors organization.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Sentinel initially started by trying to use low-cost sensors to monitor surface ships in a A2/AD environment. The team has found that their mission value is really to enable more efficient and informed strategic decisions by filling in intelligence gaps about surface ships from heterogeneous data.

Slide 11 is the team’s first pass at understanding what a get-keep-grow pipeline would look like. Note the details of the “get” stage – awareness, interest, consideration and purchase.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Capella Space started class believing that launching a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites into space to provide real-time radar imaging was their business.  Now they’ve realized that the SAR data and analytics is the business.

On slide 3 Capella gave me a reminder why Customer Discovery in this class is hard. In most other classes we insist in face-to-face interviews and if those aren’t possible high resolution video conference. This way you can read their body language and see their reactions to minimal viable products. But for some in the DOD/IC that’s not possible. The team realized that sending their MVP before the interview got them very different reactions then just conversations.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Right of Boom is trying to help foreign military explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams better accomplish their mission.  Now they are developing systems, workflows, and incentives for allied foreign militaries with the goal of improved intelligence fidelity.

The team is discovering that the value proposition for the problem they are solving may not be a hardware or software solution, but perhaps could be solved by different information flows across the beneficiaries.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

NarrativeMind is developing tools that will optimize discovery and investigation of adversary communication trends on social media, allowing ARCYBER and others to efficiently respond and mitigate threats posed by enemy messaging.

This week the team further refined the rapid funding of R&D and prototypes through a funding mechanism called Other Transactional Authority in Slides 2-5. They further refined the org chart of who owned the problem within the DOD/IC in slide 6. They further refined their Minimal Viable Product to product/market fit in Slides 8-10.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Skynet is using drones to to provide ground troops with situational awareness – helping prevent battlefield fatalities by pinpointing friendly and enemy positions.

Slides 3-4 are the team’s first pass at understanding what a get-keep-grow pipeline would look like. Note the details of the “get” stage – awareness, interest, consideration and purchase.  In slide 5 the team had a first demo of their MVP auto tracking of drones.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Guardian is trying to counter asymmetric threats from commercial drones. This week the team worked to understand what a get-keep-grow pipeline would look like in slides 5-7.  Their sponsor invited them to attend the drone conference at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The team will be flying there and back in between classes.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Advanced Lecture – Mission Achievement
Joe Felter presented the advanced lecture on Mission Achievement.

In a business the aim is to earn more money than you spend and you measure achievement/success by the revenue you bring in. In a mission-driven organization such as the defense and intelligence community, there is no revenue to measure. Instead you mobilize resources and a budget to solve a particular problem and create value for a set of beneficiaries (customers, support organizations, warfighters, Congress, the country, etc.)  So we ask the teams: how do you measure mission success/achievement for both the sum of the beneficiaries and for each individual beneficiary.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Lessons Learned

  • The deeper teams dig into the problems some are discovering their initial hypotheses about product/market fit are wrong
    • Some are also discovering that they are adding to their sponsors understanding of the problem
  • This creates uncertainty and confusion
    • Some teams are in the “ditch of despair”
  • They all come out of it
    • with a deeper understanding of the problem and the product/market fit between the beneficiaries/value proposition
  • Many of them will pivot
    • This is what enables Lean teams to move with speed and urgency

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Teaching | 1 Comment »

Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 30: Guido Kovalskys and Doris Korda

Posted on May 5, 2016 by steve blank

There was a time when having the information gave you the power. That’s no longer the key. The problem isn’t getting information or data; it’s knowing what to do with it.

Founders will always encounter naysayers, shut out the voices and listen to the customers instead. It gets you to a business faster.

Two lessons from the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show.

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.

Guido Kolvaskys

Guido Kovalskys

Joining me in from the studio at Stanford University were:

DorisKorda

Doris Korda

Listen to the full interviews with Guido and Doris by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here.

(And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interview are below.

Guido Kovalskys founded four companies in the last 15 years — classroom education, entertainment, health care and adventure vacation destinations and worked at McKinsey & Company before becoming a startup founder.

 While doing Nearpod his education startup, Guido learned to listen to the customers and shut out the naysayers:

Guido: I was clueless about how the education system worked other than as a consumer… so I’m learning a lot. Including that there are a lot of naysayers in the education business. They say things like “There’s a lot of government money and we don’t want to deal with that.” “There’s unions and you don’t want to deal with unions.”

There’s a lot of negative stuff from investors, from sometimes employees. … the publicity around working in education as a for-profit company is not the best one, but it’s huge and important for our society, and I think we need more entrepreneurs in this space.

So I decided to ignore the naysayers. If you feel passionate, and have positive customer feedback, then go do it. You’ll find a way to actually make a business in the space.

Steve:  With almost everything great, people have said, you can’t do that. “The world is flat, you’re going to fall of the edge.” “You can’t go to the moon.” “You can’t build electric cars.” “Who’s going to want a personal computer on your desk?” and “Who’s going to want to talk to your friends on some Facebook? That’s just some kind of stupid idea.” I think every great idea has had that phrase. 

Guido: (Nods.) Nearpod in particular had a lot of that feedback. The first one was, “Mobile devices are not going to get into classrooms anytime soon.” Well they were wrong, it’s happening now.

The second thing we heard was, “Teachers, these are not great customers. They don’t make a lot of money. They will not spend their money on these lessons. They don’t have an influence on the ways the districts spend money. I’ve seen it before. There’s a Death Valley of startups trying to do business with schools and teachers. Don’t do that.”

Well, here we are with $5 million in annual revenues and we’re a consumer company that starts with teachers first, and we don’t charge them a dime.

Now the new naysayer narrative is, “this is not going to scale. …”

So there’s always a good way to destroy what you’re doing. If you really believe it, you put energy and effort, there might be a chance.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Prior to her 21 years as an educator, Doris Korda spent 15 years as an engineer-turned-entrepreneur in the cowboy days of the high tech industry. She started at AT&T Bell Laboratories, then grew a small network company she sold to Sterling Commerce.

While working at Bell Labs, Doris honed one of the most essential skills for a founder:

Doris:  I learned to ask questions and not to be afraid of asking questions. That sounds like a simple thing, but back then, in the tech world, it was mostly engineers talking tech, bits and bytes. There were lots of people in the room (who were) a lot smarter than I was, technically. I always wanted to know why should we do this, who wants it, who needs it. I talked to people.

I learned a lot about asking questions, asking why? I learned how to form and cultivate shared interest among people in a system where everybody had individual interests. That sounds like a fancy thing, but it’s really just about a lot of relationship-building.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Doris had been on the job at Bell Labs for a year when the company was broken up. Her youth and inexperience became assets as the company worked to remain competitive:

Doris: Some of my colleagues were paralyzed by the change, but I looked for ways to take the piece parts that my particular unit was allowed to work with and create new solutions. I partnered with people all over the company and I basically built new products.

It was really exciting, because they were so desperate for any kind of competitive success, and I was really, really successful. I ended up at a very early age being promoted, and that put me on the fast track, given awards, all this stuff. When I look back and I think about how young I was, and what they let me do, they were crazy. But it was a great opportunity.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

—

A founder must love his work, Guido said:

You have to fall in love with the problem. If you’re going to spend your next 5, 10, 15 years working on something it might be as well something that you really feel passionate about. 

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

He talked about what went wrong with Bionexo, his first startup:

Our plan was very theoretical. The business model for automating hospitals was perfect on paper, but we missed very tiny little details, like hospitals don’t have computers for example! This is back in 2000 and most hospitals in Brazil didn’t have computers. And we missed another detail like the procurement process in hospitals in Brazil were corrupt. The person that needed to approve the system was not really interested in actually pushing it forward.

Even though the theory was perfect, we were way ahead of our time.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

And he discussed why immigrant founders face cultural challenges:

Guido: I get the feeling that as an immigrant when you put your feet off the plate you get punished harder. You always have to be watching your back. It’s not that I feel that way at all. I was lucky to come legally to the U.S I came for business school I came for work. I didn’t suffer the typical stigma. I worked at McKinsey. That gave me that interesting aura, really respect academic and professional background. But I think immigrants in general have a challenge in terms of behaving extremely well …

Steve: They have to be better citizens than the citizens just to prove that you deserve to be a citizen?

Guido: Yeah.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here

—

The Hawken School entrepreneurship program is modeled on the Lean LaunchPad curriculum, and has been adopted by high schools across the country. Doris explained how it works and why it’s effective:

I find real businesses with real and urgent startup problems around Cleveland who are willing to let a bunch of high school kids work on those problems.

The students get out of the building to talk with customers. They learn creative problem solving. They learn collaboration.

We run the class like a startup. The students are on four different teams working on real problems with real deadlines. They learn critical thinking. They read more and write more. We can’t imagine how much. They learn quantitative analysis. They learn statistics.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

She also discussed why the education system is ripe for an overhaul:

Doris:  The school system that we have now was created at a time when what mattered most was that everybody learn pretty specific content and it worked. It worked for a long time.

Steve:  What do you mean, like math and history?

Doris:  Yeah,  if you’re going to take a math class, these are the exact things you need to know and this is out of all of what’s happened in history, you need to graduate high school having learned the following things, etc.

What the world needs is not a bunch of people who’ve graduated high school and can recite the quadratic formula from memory, but people who can be smart about knowing what questions to ask and how to solve really complicated problems that the world has never seen yet. 

There was a time when having the information gave you the power. That’s no longer the key. The problem isn’t getting information or data; it’s knowing what to do with it.

If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Guido and Doris by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Congressmen Daniel Lipinski and Seth Moulton discuss how the government’s innovation efforts are now Lean.

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Want to be a guest on the show? Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey.

Filed under: Customer Development, SiriusXM Radio Show | 2 Comments »

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Week 5

Posted on May 2, 2016 by steve blank

We just held our fifth week of the Hacking for Defense class. This week the teams passed the half way mark in the class. They’ve collectively talked to over 550 beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.) Their focus for this week was to figure out how to get products rapidly deployed into their sponsors organization. Our advanced lecture explained how to get buy-in for your solution by creating an insurgency among your supporters and advocates.

(This post is a continuation of the series. See all the H4D posts here (and also read Pete Newell’s weekly class summaries here.) Because of the embedded presentations this post is best viewed on the website.)

This is not a typical class
If you’ve been reading these weekly blogs, you’ve seen by now this is not a typical class.

The class is a combination of theory and intensive practice. First and foremost, it is experiential and hands-on. The teams live and die by the Lean Startup credo: “There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside.” That’s why, just halfway through the class, they’ve already talked to 550 beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.)

The Lean Methodology requires teams to abandon their preconceived notions of how one builds startups and solve problems – The class is designed to break students out of that all too common mindset that they understand customer’s problems, can design a solution and want to get right to work on building it – all without contact with the stakeholders, users, decision makers, etc.

After decades of teaching I have found that getting students to really change these beliefs cannot be done with reading, case studies or in-class simulations – at least not in the short time we have them in the class. If we really want them to understand how to efficiently and rapidly understand and solve customer problems, we needed to immerse them with customers on day one.

And if we want them to understand what life outside the classroom in an early stage venture will look like, then they need to experience chaos, conflicting data, uncertainty and good-enough decision making for 10 confusing weeks.

We start by pushing the teams incredibly hard to set the pace (and wash out any of those who can’t work at this pace.) Teams hit the class running. Before the first class, each team has already spoken to 10 customers, and they are challenged to present their mission model canvases within 20 minutes of walking through the classroom door. Within 5 minutes from the first time a team starts to present, they get hit with “relentlessly direct” critiques.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

But by week 5, (this week) the teams have either embraced the Lean process or we’re not going to get through to them. So at this point in the class we begin to dial down the tone and tenor of the comments, and over the next four weeks become their cheerleaders rather than their taskmasters.

In week 9 we’ll stop and use the week and class for “reflection”. We’ve found that getting the teams off the customer discovery treadmill at this point helps them to look back and reflect on what they’ve really learned, not just about their product/customers but more importantly about the lean processes, themselves, and team work.

Team Presentations: Week 5
This week the teams were primarily trying to answer how products get from demo to deployment in their sponsors agency.

In all team presentations, note that their new learnings each week are highlighted on their Mission Model canvas in red.

Sentinel initially started by trying to use low-cost sensors to monitor surface ships in a A2/AD environment. The team has found that their mission value is really to enable more efficient and informed strategic decisions by filling in intelligence gaps about surface ships from heterogeneous data.

Slides 4-27 is one of the best illustrations (actually an animation) of how all the beneficiaries work and interact. Slide 29-33 is their detailed drill-down on how their solution could get acquired and deployed in the Navy.
Sentinel Mission Model

Slide 34 summarizes their current Mission Model canvas. Notice that each beneficiary has a matching value proposition. These relationships are expanded in detail on slides 35-38.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

NarrativeMind is developing tools that will optimize discovery and investigation of adversary communication trends on social media, allowing  the U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) and others to efficiently respond and mitigate threats posed by enemy messaging.

This week, in slide 3, the team further refined where ARCYBER sat in the org chart of who owned the problem within the DOD/IC and the  acquisition process.

They learned about getting rapid funding of R&D and prototypes through a funding mechanism called Other Transactional Authority in slide 4. They further refined their Minimal Viable Product to product/market fit in Slides 7 and 8. Their Mission Model canvas in slide 9 has an updated set of beneficiaries now refined in the Value Proposition canvases in slides 10 – 17.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Guardian is trying to counter asymmetric threats from commercial drones. This week the team worked to understand a day-in-the-life of a Forward Operating Base (FOB) documenting the roles of the captain, lieutenant and a private on a guard tower (slides 5 and 6). They worked on understanding how they would get a counter drone solution deployed through the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group (slides 7-9).

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Skynet is using drones to to provide ground troops with situational awareness – helping prevent battlefield fatalities by pinpointing friendly and enemy positions.

The team validated several critical hypotheses about technology and acquisition (slide 2), further refined their Minimum Viable Product (slide 3) and really dug into the path of getting a solution acquired and deployed in the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in slides 4 – 9.  Their summary of their learning is highlighted on their Mission Model canvas on Slide 10.  Like Fishreel’s analysis, Skynet’s detailed Value Proposition canvases (slides 11 – 16) are also case studies on how to get to a deep understanding of the problems of all the beneficiaries and stakeholders in an organization.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Capella Space is launching a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites into space to provide real-time radar imaging.

Capella Space is pivoting towards commercial customers based on consistent feedback from the government. They’re finding that the government doesn’t want to pay for launch and sustainment, but instead would rather be users of commercial data.

One of the previous weeks’ hypotheses was that the Coast Guard would want and need synthetic aperture radar images and data (slide 5.) The team did extensive customer discovery at the Coast Guard 11th district command center and seemed find that the problem was not all that acute.  Depressing – but great learning. They continue to believe that the National Geospatial Agency may be a potential DOD customer (slide 9), but are struggling to find the people to talk to.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Aqualink started the class working to give Navy divers a system of wearable devices that records data critical to diver health and safety and makes the data actionable through real-time alerts and post-dive analytics. Their customer discovery helped them to understand that there were three beneficiaries (slide 2): the operators (SEAL divers), medical officers and medical researchers.  Slides 4 and slide 5 show their decision process to focus on the more immediate problem – underwater geolocation. Slides 6 and 7 describe the organization of SOCOM and how products get deployed to the divers. Slide 8, their mission model canvas, highlights their new learnings about deployment and beneficiaries in red. Slides 15-17 diagrams their understanding of the product acquisition and deployment process.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Right of Boom is trying to help foreign military explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams better accomplish their mission. Now they are developing systems, workflows, and incentives for allied foreign militaries with the goal of improved intelligence fidelity.

This week their customer discovery got them to the current lead in Iraq for the Joint iED Defeat Agency (JIDA) (slide 2). This helped them refine their map of how IED information flows (slide 6).  They mapped how to get a product deployed in JIDA in slide 9. This is leading them to a Minimal Viable Product neither they nor JIDA expected in slide 15.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Advanced Presentation Supporters and Advocates- Creating an Insurgency
The advanced lecture for this week explained how to create “buy-in” among all the beneficiaries.  Pete Newell described how to use anecdotes, artifacts and story-telling to create an insurgency among the advocates for your solution.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

Team Learning Updates
A few of the teams independently starting writing weekly one-page status reports to their sponsors and mentors. This was a great idea. It keeps the sponsors and mentors informed and makes them feel they’re part of the team.

Hacking for Defense Goes National
This week three Universities announced their intention to offer Hacking For Defense this fall –  The University of California at San Diego (UCSD), the University of Pittsburg, and the University of Rochester/ Rochester Institute for Technology.

As we scale the program, the DOD/IC sponsors have requested they have a single point of contact for the soliciting and validating the problems. So we’ll have a single site acting as the “sponsor challenge clearinghouse” for the schools that will be teaching the course.

We’ll have more to say about scaling the program, funding and the Hacking for Defense educators course in later blog posts.

Lessons Learned

  • The teams are learning what it takes to turn a demo into a deployable solution that gets to the field
  • The teams and sponsors are both learning how to accurately define the problem(s)
  • This learning will save time, money and lives

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Teaching | Leave a comment »