Lean Launch Pad 2026 @ Stanford – Lessons Learned Presentations

Posted on June 16, 2026 by steve blank

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford.

In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups.

The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions.

During the 2026 spring quarter the eight teams spoke to 978 potential customers, beneficiaries and regulators. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class.

This Class Launched a Revolution in Teaching Entreprenurship – AI Is Changing It
This class was designed to break out of “how to write a business plan” as the capstone of entrepreneurial education. A business plan assumed that all startups needed to do was to write a plan, raise money and then execute the plan. We overturned that orthodoxy when we pointed out that while existing organizations execute business models, startups search for them. And that a startup was a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scaleable business model. This class was designed to teach startups how to search for a business model. I’ll summarize some of the learnings about the use of AI at the end of this post.

Several government-funded programs have adopted this class at scale. The first was in 2011 when we turned this syllabus into the curriculum for the National Science Foundation I-Corps. Errol Arkilic, the then head of commercialization at the National Science Foundation, adopted the class saying, “You’ve developed the scientific method for startups, using the Business Model Canvas as the laboratory notebook.” Now in its second decade and in 100+ universities, I-Corps has become a standard for science commercialization at the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy –  training 3,251 teams and launching 1,400+ startups to date.

Team Office Hours

If you can’t see the Team Office Hours video click here

If you can’t see the Team Office hours slides click here

If you can’t see a demo of the Team Office Hours app click here

Design of This Class
While the Lean LaunchPad students are experiencing what appears to them to be a fully hands-on, experiential class, it’s a carefully designed illusion. In fact, it’s highly structured. The syllabus has been designed so that we are offering continual implicit guidance, structure, and repetition. This is a critical distinction between our class and an open-ended experiential class.

Guidance, Direction and Structure – For example, students start the class with their own initial guidance – they believe they have an idea for a product or service (Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps) or have been given a clear real-world problem (Hacking for Defense). Coming into the class, students believe their goal is to validate their commercialization or deployment hypotheses. (The teaching team knows that over the course of the class, students will discover that most of their initial hypotheses are incorrect.)

Team Izhaar

If you can’t see the Team Izhaar click here

If you can’t see the Team Izhaar presentation click here

Team Trained on Me

If you can’t see the Team Trained on Me video click here

If you can’t see the Team Trained on Me presentation click here

The Business Model Canvas
The business model / mission model canvas offers students guidance, explicit direction, and structure. First, the canvas offers a complete, visual roadmap of all the hypotheses they will need to test over the entire class. Second, the canvas helps the students goal-seek by visualizing what an optimal endpoint would look like – finding product/market fit. Finally, the canvas provides students with a map of what they learn week-to-week through their customer discovery work. I can’t overemphasize the important role of the canvas. Unlike an incubator or accelerator with no frame, the canvas acts as the connective tissue – the frame – that students can fall back on if they get lost or confused. It allows us to teach the theory of how to turn an idea, need, or problem into commercial practice, week by week a piece at a time.

Team Artemis

If you can’t see the Team Artemis video click here

If you can’t see the Team Artemis presentation click here

Lean LaunchPad Tools
The tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.) offer guidance and structure for students to work outside the classroom. The explicit goal of 10-15 customer interviews a week along with the requirement for building a continual series of minimal viable products provides metrics that track the team’s progress. The mandatory office hours with the instructors and support from mentors provide additional guidance and structure.

Team Remainder

If you can’t see the Team Remainder video click here

If you can’t see the Team Remainder slides click here

Team Microprint

If you can’t see the Team Microprint video click here

If you can’t see the Team Microprint slides click here

Team Vital Health


If you can’t see the team Vital Health video click here

If you can’t see the team Vital Health presentation click here

Team Nimbus

If you can’t see the Team Nimbus video click here

If you can’t see the Team Nimbus presentation click here

AI In the Classroom

AI Embedded in the Class
This was the first year where all teams used AI to help create their business model canvas, build working MVPs in hours, generate customer questions, analyze and summarizing interviews.

AI has had some obvious and not so obvious impacts on our class.
First, here’s a summary of how our students used AI in both classes I taught this quarter.

If you can’t see the AI Use In Class slide click here

AI Tools Used
Claude + Granola – were the AI tools used by everyone.
Large Language Models Used
– Claude, Claude Code, Claude Chrome extension, Claude Cowork, Claude Design
– ChatGPT
– Gemini
Note taking
– Granola
– Twinmind
Presentations
– Perplexity
Building prototypes
– Replit
– Lovable
Creating Synthetic Users
– Listen Labs
– Viewpoints AI
Summarizing Research
– Google NotebookLM
– Notion + G Suite (not strictly AI, but used as part of AI workflows)
Other
– Ultralytics YOLOv8 (used by the SwarmShield H4D team for drone detection/tracking MVP)

AI Classroom Usage
Three of our students did a tutorial of how they used AI in the classroom.

If you can’t see the AI Classroom Usage tutorial click here

Impact of AI in the Classroom
The obvious and positive changes of AI were that teams were able to do customer discovery more efficiently. The not so obvious change was that creating products rapidly allowed teams to make bad ideas go faster. In the past, MVPs were a sign of a teams technical competence, but now spinning up something in hours that previously took weeks, means that an MVP is no longer evidence of critical thinking and hypothesis testing.

This meant student learning was unbalanced. A finished-looking product felt like success. Students confused a polished deliverable with the need to deeply understand the needs of all the stakeholders, as well as the need for Customer Validation. Team understanding was less nuanced. There was less depth uniformly across the teams about the problem they were solving and understanding customer needs. In this class it wasn’t the AI that was hallucinating –  it was teams. They pivoted late as they assumed that a polished product meant product/market fit.

Going forward we’ll have students come into class with a prototype but next time accompanied by the explicit hypotheses and experiments they’ll use to validate whether the prototype solved an actual problem.

On the other hand, students built some amazing Claude Skills and Gemini Gems. They were tons of untapped opportunities to build digital twins or test 10’s or 100’s of apps simultaneously.

More about this in a separate blog post.

It Takes A Village
While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of Lean LaunchPad at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.

The teaching team consisted of myself and:

  • Steve Weinstein, partner at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of the major motion picture studios.
  • Lee Redden – CTO and co-founder of Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere) who was a student in the first Lean LaunchPad class 14 years ago! I wrote a post about Lee’s journey here.
  • Jennifer Carolan, Co-Founder, Partner at Reach Capital the leading education VC and author of the Hacking for Education class.

Our teaching assistants this year were: Roya Meykadeh, Aditi Mahajan, Alina Hu.

The teams were assisted by mentors: David Kopp, Mitch Singer, Pradeep Jotwani, Dave Epstein, Anil Kamath, Bobby Mukherjee, Rekha Pai, Venkat Krisnamurthy and mentor team coordinator Todd Basche.

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | Leave a comment »

Incorruptible

Posted on June 9, 2026 by steve blank

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries.

Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix. 

Some will read this book, think it’s interesting and then get back to figuring out to how get their next big round of funding or how to deal with AI disruption in their large company.

But what they’ll miss is that this is the book that will rebuild the corporate and startup world after the next financial crash.

That’s exactly what happened when Eric’s work, Alexander Osterwald’s work and mine created the Lean Startup. Lean was a neat theory until the dot com bubble crashed and investors (those who still had jobs,) were hiding under their desks. Only then were startups and VCs amenable to a radically new idea about how to build new ventures.

The same will happen here.

Part 1 is a great tutorial on how corporations morphed from serving the people to serving only its shareholders. Worth reading deeply.

Part 2 is the nuts and bolts about what to do about it. How to build companies with governance structures that endure.

Part 3 is about the network effect of building this class of companies. It also has a chapter that buries the lead. Eric had the core ideas for the concepts in the book in 2019 when he started the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). Never heard of it? Welcome to the club. Its core diagnosis was absolutely right: public markets reward short-termism. LTSE tried to solve a governance problem with an exchange listing. In hindsight it took all the accumulated wisdom in this book to understand what it will take to make meaningful change.

Its time may come and this book may be the catalyst.

This book will possibly be more important than the Lean Startup ever was – for you, your company and society as a whole. Read it.

Filed under: Customer Development | 2 Comments »

Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2026 – Lessons Learned Presentations

Posted on June 8, 2026 by steve blank

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford.

This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than the previous classes.
(I’ll summarize some of the learnings about the use of AI at the end of this post.)

Hacking for Defense is now in 70 universities, including 20+ in the UK – and this year in Poland and Germany – with teams of students working to understand and help solve national security problems.

This year’s problems came from the Navy, Air Force, Army Research Lab, Defense Innovation Unit, IQT, and NASA.

This quarter 9 teams of 42 students at Stanford collectively interviewed 1132 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while simultaneously building a series of AI-driven minimal viable products and developing a path to deployment.

We opened this year’s final presentations session with a great talk about AI and defense – past, present and future – from (Ret) LTG Jack Shanahan. Jack was the Director of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). Watching his talk is a worthwhile use of your time.

If you can’t see Jack Shanahan’s video click here

During the quarter guest speakers in the class included Owen West – director of the Defense Innovation Unit, Mike Brown – partner at Shield Capital, (Ret) LTG Joseph McGee recent head of the Joint Staff J5 (strategy, plans, and policy,) and Hon Marise Payne Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

“Lessons Learned” Presentations
Each of the eight teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation along with a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. Unlike traditional demo days where teams show off, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” the Lessons Learned presentations tell the story of each team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery. It’s a roller coaster narrative describing what happens when they discover that everything they thought they knew on day one was wrong and how they eventually got it right.

While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas, Customer Development and AI tools to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.

This year we had the teams add two new slides at the end of their presentation: 1) tell us which AI tools they used, and 2) their estimate of progress on the Technology Readiness Level and Investment Readiness Level.

Here’s how they did it and what they delivered.

Team Noctua – Started with a problem that said, “Special operators can’t detect drones passively, without exposing their position.” They ended up understanding that a larger problem was, “Dismounted troops and base defenders lack a passive means to provide early warning detection of all types of drones, including those that are RF silent.

If you can’t see the Noctura video click here

If you can’t see the Noctura presentation click here

These are “Wicked” Problems
Wicked problems refer to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious and lacks a definitive formula. Most problems our Hacking For Defense students work on fall into this category. They are often ambiguous. They start with a problem from a sponsor, and not only is the solution unclear but figuring out how to acquire and deploy it is also complex. Most often students find that in hindsight the problem was a symptom of a more interesting and complex problem – and that Acquisition in the Dept of War is unlike anything in the commercial world.

Instead of admiring problems from inside a classroom our students get of the building and learn, discovery and iterate.

The figure shows the types of problems Hacking for Defense students encounter, with the most common ones shaded.

Team SwarmShield – The initial problem was framed as, the cost of using expensive interceptors to shoot down cheap drones. By the end of the class the Team realized the problem was building terminal guidance that lets a cheap, throwaway drone find and hit an attacker at night.

If you can’t see the SwarmShield summary video click here.

If you can’t see the SwarmShield presentation click here

Department of War Directory – This year the students had access to a Department of War Directory – essentially a phonebook of  ~5,700 names of “Who buys in the Dept of War?” The directory includes a tutorial on how the DoW buys and the various acquisition and funding processes and programs that exist for startups. It provides details on how to sell to the DoW and where the Program Acquistion Officers (PAEs) fit into that process.

 

Team Weapons Without Wait – The initial problem for this team was “Retool and scale defense manufacturing capacity to replenish critical munitions at the pace required by sustained, high-intensity conflicts.”  This is what I call a “boil the ocean” problem” – big and vast – and vague. By class end the team realized what was rapidly achievable (and needed) was affordable, certified munitions for small drones produced at the point-of-need.

If you can’t see the Weapons Without Wait video click here

If you can’t see the Weapons Without Wait presentation click here

It Started With An Idea
Hacking for Defense is built on the same methodology as Lean LaunchPad class I created at Stanford in 2011. It was adopted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the NSF I-Corps (Innovation Corps) to train Principal Investigators who wanted an SBIR grant. Now in its second decade and in 100+ universities, I-Corps has become a standard for science commercialization at the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy –  training 3,251 teams and launching 1,400+ startups to date.

Team IonX – IonX also started with a “boil the ocean” problem – The US needs a secure rare earth supply chain. They ended up with a problem more tangible and deliverable – Mineral processors across markets can’t identify and test better chemical reagent schemes.

If you can’t see the IonX video click here

If you can’t see the IonX presentation click here

Origins Of Hacking For Defense
In 2016, brainstorming with Pete Newell of BMNT and Joe Felter at Stanford, we observed that students in our research universities had little connection to the problems their government was trying to solve. We realized the same Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class would provide a framework to do so. That year we launched both Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy (with Professor Jeremy Weinstein and the State Department) at Stanford.

Team Cheese on the Moon – Started with a mandate to search for mineral deposits on the moon. By class end they realized that to do that lunar missions need to know what’s on and under the moon not only to mine, but to land.

If you can’t see the Cheese on the Moon video click here

If you can’t see the Cheese on the Moon presentation click here

Goals for Hacking for Defense
A decade ago, our goal for the class was to teach students Lean Innovation methods while they engaged in national public service. We wanted to familiarize students with the military as a profession and help them better understand its expertise, and its role in society. We also hoped the class would show our sponsors a methodology that builds problem understanding before writing requirements.

The class still does all this, but now that the DoW is buying from startups and defense venture capital is abundant, the class has turned into a national security incubator. Most of our teams form defense companies.

Team Fuel Forge started with the problem that combat units need to generate power and fuel locally. They ended with a more interesting observation that they could build networked, on-site hydrogen nodes to fuel drones in forward, contested environments where resupply is at risk,

If you can’t see the Fuel Forge video click here

If you can’t see the Fuel Forge presentation click here

Go-to-Market/Deployment Strategies
The initial goal of the teams is to ensure they understand the problem. The next step is to see if they can find mission/solution fit (the DoW equivalent of commercial product/market fit.) But most importantly, the class teaches the teams about the difficult and complex path of getting a solution in the hands of a warfighter/beneficiary. While the DoW has made tremendous strides in reforming how and who they buy from, students still need to know: Who writes the requirement? What’s an OTA? What’s color of money? What’s a Program Manager? Who owns the current contract?

Team Luminarch – Started with Tactical units lack the capability to visualize, manage, and adapt to the electromagnetic spectrum in real time. They ended with Tactical units lack low-cost, attritable RF sensors that can be deployed at scale, limiting their ability to detect threats, manage signatures, and communicate.

If you can’t see the Luminarch video click here

If you can’t see the Luminarch presentation click here

Team Tessellate– Started with the observation that drone missions don’t scale. And ended by realizing what’s missing is US multi-drone doctrine doesn’t exist and current drone warfare changes are happening faster than the software lifecycle.

If you can’t see the Tessellate video click here

If you can’t see the Tessellate presentation click here

AI In the Class Room
AI has had some obvious and not so obvious impacts on our class.
First, here’s a summary of how our students used AI in both classes I taught this quarter.

If you can’t see the AI Use In Class slide click here

If you can’t see the AI Rap Video click here

AI Tools Used
Claude + Granola – were the AI tools used by everyone.
Large Language Models Used
– Claude, Claude Code, Claude Chrome extension, Claude Cowork, Claude Design
– ChatGPT
– Gemini
Note taking
– Granola
– Twinmind
Presentations
– Perplexity
Building prototypes
– Replit
– Lovable
Creating Synthetic Users
– Listen Labs
– Viewpoints AI
Summarizing Research
– Google NotebookLM
– Notion + G Suite (not strictly AI, but used as part of AI workflows)
Other
– Ultralytics YOLOv8 (used by the SwarmShield H4D team for drone detection/tracking MVP)

The obvious and positive changes of AI were that teams were able to do customer discovery more efficiently. The not so obvious change was that creating products rapidly allowed teams to make bad ideas go faster.

In the past, MVPs were a sign of a teams technical competence, but now spinning up something in hours that previously took weeks, means that an MVP is no longer evidence of critical thinking and hypothesis testing.

This meant student learning was unbalanced. A finished-looking product felt like success. Students confused a polished deliverable with the need to deeply understand the needs of all the stakeholders, as well as the need for Customer Validation. For defense startups that means understanding a path to a CRADA, or to a research or production OTA. We needed to slow the teams down. Going forward we’ll have students come into class with a prototype but next time accompanied by the explicit hypotheses and experiments they’ll use to validate whether the prototype solved an actual problem.

More about this in a separate blog post.

It Takes A Village
While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of Hacking for Defense at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.

The teaching team consisted of myself and:

  • Pete Newell, retired Army Colonel and ex Director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, now CEO of BMNT.
  • Joe Felter, retired Army Special Forces Colonel; and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania; currently Director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford which we co-founded in 2021.
  • Steve Weinstein, partner at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios.
  • Chris Moran, Executive Director and General Manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures; the venture capital investment arm of Lockheed Martin.
  • Jeff Decker, a Stanford researcher focusing on dual-use research. Jeff served in the U.S. Army as a special operations light infantry squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Jillian Manus, a venture partner at Shield Capital and Senior U.S Venture Advisor for the European Innovation Council

Our teaching assistants this year were: Evan John Twarog, Varsha Saravanan, Breno Casciello, and Luke Andrews.

34 Sponsors, Business and National Security Mentors
The teams were assisted by sponsors and mentors.

Sponsors were originators of the team problems. They gave us their toughest national security problems: Owen West, Will Ryan, Phillip “Donna” Smith, Joel Uzarski, Alexandra Bissey, Mark Breier, Jonathan Stock, Trent Emeneker,  Matthew Anderson, Ana Alvarez, Jonathan Boltersdorf.

National Security Mentors helped students who came into the class with no knowledge of the Department of War, understand the complexity, intricacies and nuances of those organizations: Katie Tobin, Kelly McGannon, Rachel Costello, Henning Heine, Josh Edwards, Marco Romani, Tom Schmitz, David Vernal, Rich Lawson, Dan Ruttenber, Ashley Perry, Sophia Vahanvaty, Rick Lu, Chris O’Connor

Business Mentors helped the teams understand if their solutions could be a commercially successful business: Doug Seiche, Jeremy Schoos, Adam Waters,, Matt Croce, Isobel Porteous, Eric Byler, Diane Schrader, Donnie Hasseltine, Mark McVay.

Sponsoring Organizations: Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, Common Mission Project, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BMNT, Defense Innovation Unit.

Thanks to all!


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