The landscape for how to turn life science and health care technologies into viable companies has changed more in the last 3 years than in the last 30. New approaches to translational medicine have emerged. Our Lean Launchpad® for Life Sciences is one of them. But a new class of life science/healthcare co-working and collaboration […]
Filed under: Lean LaunchPad, Life Sciences (NIH), Teaching | 7 Comments »
With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes) makes Kauffman the dominant player in the entrepreneurship space. Kauffman launched Founders School – a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups […]
Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 7 Comments »
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein Entrepreneurship As A Management Science Those of you who have been reading my blog already know that I have been talking about a new approach to entrepreneurship education called “E-School” or the Durant School of Entrepreneurship. I believe that we have now […]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Teaching | 19 Comments »
Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of […]
Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 7 Comments »
One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship, an introduction to building a scalable startup. While the class is open to everyone at the University, we want to teach science and engineering undergraduates how they can take a technical idea and turn it into […]
Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 35 Comments »
Some of the most important business lessons are learned in the most unlikely ways. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss. Not a process I recommend, but one in which the lessons stuck for a lifetime. (Read the previous Ardent […]
Filed under: Ardent | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup | 50 Comments »
A week before I started I got inkling of really how deep I was in. While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement. She […]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Steve Blank | 8 Comments »
Often the opposite of disruption is the status quo. If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. These two books, one by a practitioner, the other by an investor, are must-reads. The Fixer is 1/3rd autobiography, 1/3rd case studies, and 1/3rd a “how-to” manual. […]
Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Customer Development | 2 Comments »
It’s always fun to see what happens to my students after they leave class. Jeff Witten started CoinOut four years ago in my Columbia University 5-day Lean LaunchPad class. CoinOut eliminates the hassle of getting a pocket full of loose change from merchants by allowing you to put it in a digital wallet. Jeff just appeared on […]
Filed under: Customer Development, Teaching | 5 Comments »
I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. She was an academic on leave from Stanford now selling SAAS software to large companies, but was being inundated with marketing communications advice. “My engineers say our website is old school, and we need […]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing | 4 Comments »
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