A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Posted on March 8, 2011 by steve blank

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship.

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.

We thought it would be interesting to share the week-by-week progress of how the class actually turned out. This post is part one.

A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship
As the students filed into the classroom, my entrepreneurial reality distortion field began to weaken. What if I was wrong? Could we even could find 40 Stanford graduate students interested in being guinea pigs for this new class? Would anyone even show up?  Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. Startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. Startups are in fact only temporary organizations, organized to search–not execute–for a scalable and repeatable business model.

We were going to toss teaching the business plan aside and try to teach engineering students a completely new approach to start companies – one which combines customer development, agile development, business models and pivots. (The slides below and the syllabus here describe the details of the class.)

Get Out of the Building and test the Business Model
While we were going to teach theory and frameworks, these students were going to get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company. Over the quarter, teams of students would put the theory to work, using these tools to get out of the building and talk to customer/partners, etc. to get hard-earned information. (The purpose of getting out of the building is not to verify a financial model but to hypothesize and verify the entire business model. It’s a subtle shift but a big idea with tremendous changes in the end result.)

Team Autonomow: Weeding Robot Prototype on a Farm

We were going to teach entrepreneurship like you teach artists – combining theory – with intensive hands-on practice. And we were assuming that this approach would work for any type of startup – hardware, medical devices, etc. – not just web-based startups.

If we were right, we’d see the results in their final presentations – after 8 weeks of class the information/learning density in the those presentations should be really high. In fact they would be dramatically different than any other teaching method.

But we could be wrong.

While I had managed to persuade two great VC’s to teach the class with me (Jon Feiber and Ann Miura-ko), what if I was wasting their time? And worse, what if I was going to squander the time of my students?

I put on my best game face and watched the seats fill up in the classroom.

Mentors
A few weeks before the Stanford class began, the teaching team went through their Rolodexes and invited entrepreneurs and VCs to volunteer as coaches/mentors for the class’s teams. (Privately I feared we might have more mentors than students.) An hour before this first class, we gathered these 30 impressive mentors to brief them and answer questions they might have after reading the mentor guide which outlined the course goals and mentor responsibilities.

As the official start time of the first class drew near, I began to wonder if we had the wrong classroom. The room had filled up with close to a 100 students who wanted to get in. When I realized they were all for our class, I could start to relax. OK, somehow we got them interested. Lets see if we can keep them. And better, lets see if we can teach them something new.

The First Class
The Lean LaunchPad class was scheduled to meet for three hours once a week. Given Stanford’s 10 week quarters, we planned for eight weeks of lecture and the last two weeks for team final presentations. Our time in class would be relatively straightforward. Every week, each team would give a 10-minute presentation summarizing the “lessons learned” from getting out of the building. When all the teams were finished the teaching team lectured on one of the 9 parts of the business model diagram. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development.

The most interesting part of the class would happen outside the classroom when each team spent 50-80 hours a week testing their business model hypotheses by talking to customers and partners and (in the case of web-based businesses) building their product.

Selection, Mixer and Speed Dating
After the first class, our  teaching team met over pizza and read each of the 100 or so student applications. Two-thirds of the interested students were from the engineering school; the other third were from the business school. And the engineers were not just computer science majors, but in electrical, mechanical, aerospace, environmental, civil and chemical engineering. Some came to the class with an idea for a startup burning brightly in their heads.  Some of those applied as teams. Others came as individuals, most with no specific idea at all.

We wanted to make sure that every student who took the class had at a minimum declared a passion and commitment to startups. (We’ll see later that saying it isn’t the same as doing it.) We tried to weed out those that were unsure why they were there as well as those trying to build yet another fad of the week web site. We made clear that this class wasn’t an incubator. Our goal was to provide students with a methodology and set of tools that would last a lifetime – not to fund their first round. That night we posted the list of the students who were accepted into the class.

The next day, the teaching team held a mandatory “speed-dating” event with the newly formed teams. Each team gave each professor a three-minute elevator pitch for their idea, and we let them know if it was good enough for the class. A few we thought were non-starters were sold by teams passionate enough to convince us to let them go forward with their ideas. (The irony is that one of the key tenets of this class is that startups end up as profitable companies only after they learn, discover, iterate and Pivot past their initial idea.) I enjoyed hearing the religious zeal of some of these early pitches.

The Teams
By the beginning of second session the students had become nine teams with an amazing array of business ideas. Here is a brief summary of each.

Agora isan affordable “one-stop shop” for cloud computing needs. Intended for cloud infrastructure service providers, enterprises with spare capacity in their private clouds, startups, companies doing image and video processing, and others. Agora’s selling points are its ability to reduce users’ IT infrastructure cost and enhance revenue for service providers.

Autonomow is an autonomous large-scale mowing intended to be a money-saving tool for use on athletic fields, golf courses, municipal parks, and along highways and waterways. The product would leverage GPS and laser-based technologies and could be used on existing mower or farm equipment or built into new units.

BlinkTraffic will empower mobile users in developing markets (Jakarta, Sao Paolo, Delhi, etc.) to make informed travel decisions by providing them with real-time traffic conditions. By aggregating user-generated speed and location data, Blink will provide instantaneously generated traffic-enabled maps, optimal routing, estimated time-to-arrival and predictive itinerary services to personal and corporate users.

D.C. Veritas is making a low cost, residential wind turbine. The goal is to sell a renewable source of energy at an affordable price for backyard installation. The key assumptions are: offering not just a product, but a complete service (installation, rebates, and financing when necessary,) reduce the manufacturing cost of current wind turbines, provide home owners with a cool and sustainable symbol (achieving “Prius” status.)

JointBuy is an online platform that allows buyers to purchase products or services at a cheaper price by giving sellers opportunities to sell them in bulk. Unlike Groupon which offers one product deal per day chosen based on the customer’s location. JointBuy allows buyers to start a new deal on any available product and share the idea with others through existing social networking sites. It also allows sellers to place bids according to the size of the deal.  

MammOptics is developing an instrument that can be used for noninvasive breast cancer screening. It uses optical spectroscopy to analyze the physiological content of cells and report back abnormalities. It will be an improvement over mammography by detecting abnormal cells in an early stage, is radiation-free, and is 2-5 times less expensive than mammographs. We will sell the product directly to hospitals and private doctors.

Personal Libraries is a personal reference management system streamlinig the processes for discovering, organizing and citing researchers’ industry readings. The idea came from seeing the difficulty biomed researchers have had in citing the materials used in experiments. The Personal Libraries business model is built on the belief that researchers are overloaded with wasted energy and inefficiency and would welcome a product that eliminates the tedious tasks associated with their work.

PowerBlocks makes a line of modular lighting. Imagine a floor lamp split into a few components (the base, a mid-section, the top light piece). What would you do if wanted to make that lamp taller or shorter? Or change the top light from a torch-style to an LED-lamp? Or add a power plug in the middle? Or a USB port? Or a speaker? “PowerBlocks” modular lighting is “floor-lamp meets Legos” but much more high-end. Customers can choose components to create the exact product that fit their needs.

Voci.us is an ad-supported, web-based comment platform for daily news content. Real-time conversations and dynamic curation of news stories empowers people to expand their social networks and personal expertise about topics important to them. This addresses three problems vexing the news industry: inadequate online community engagement, poor topical search capacity on news sites, and scarcity of targeted online advertising niches.

While I was happy with how the class began, the million dollar question was still on the table – is teaching entrepreneurship with business model design and customer development better than having the students write business plans? Would we have to wait 8 more weeks until their final presentation to tell? Would we signs of success early?  Or was the business model/customer development framework just smoke, mirror and B.S.?

The Adventure Begins
We’re going to follow the adventures of a few of the teams week by week as they progressed through the class, (and we’ll share the teams weekly “lessons learned,” as well as our class lecture slides.

The goal for the teams for next week were:

  • Write down their hypotheses for each of the 9 parts of the business model.
  • Come up with ways to test:
    • what are each of the 9 business model hypotheses?
    • is their business worth pursuing (market size)
  • Come up with what constitutes a pass/fail signal for the test (e.g. at what point would you say that your hypotheses wasn’t even close to correct)?
  • Start their blog/wiki/journal for the class

Next Post: The Business Model and Customer Discovery Hypotheses – Class 2
Listen to this post here: Download the Podcast here

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 44 Comments »

The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Posted on January 27, 2011 by steve blank

Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship?

I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr, (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. The most visible step was the first International Business Model Competition, hosted by the BYU Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

What’s A Startup?
We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies executebusiness models, while startups searchfor a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) Therefore the very foundations of teaching entrepreneurship should start with how to search for a business model.

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This solution stack proposes that entrepreneurs should first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test whether these hypotheses are accurate, outside in the field (customer development) and then use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis, it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to update the business model.

Business Model Versus Business Plan
The traditional business plan is an essential organizing and planning document to launch new products in existing companies with known customers and markets. But this same document is a bad fit when used in a startup, as the customers and market are unknown. A business plan in a startup becomes an exercise in creative writing with a series of guesses about a customer problem and the product solution. Most business plans are worse than useless in preparing an entrepreneur for the real world as “no business plan survives first contact with customers.”

I suggested that if we wanted to hold competitions that actually emulated the real world (rather than what’s easy to grade) entrepreneurship educators should hold competitions that emulate what entrepreneurs actually encounter – chaos, uncertainty and unknowns. A business model competition would emulate the “out of the building” experience of real entrepreneurs executing the customer development / business model / agile stack.

The 47th (-46) Annual Business Model Competition
From the seed of this initial idea last summer Professor Nathan Furr, and his team at BYU created a global business model competition, receiving over 60 submissions from across the world. Alexander Osterwalder, Professor Furr and I were the judges for selecting the winner from the final 4 contestants. The finals were held in the packed 800 seat BYU Varsity Theater with lines of students outside unable to get in. It was an eye-opener to see each of the teams take the stage to describe their journey in trying to validate each of the 9 parts of a business model, rather than the static theory of a business plan.

Each team used the business model canvas and customer development stack to go from initial hypotheses, getting outside the building to validate their ideas with customers, and going through multiple pivots to find a validated business model. The winner was Gamegnat, a gaming information portal (take a look at their presentation here.) At the end of the competition Gavin Christensen, managing director of Kickstart Seed Fund said, “This is going to change the way we invest.” A nice testament to the visible difference in the quality of every teams presentation. The competition was an inspiration to the students, mentors and teaching teams.

Utah: Entrepreneurial Surprises
While I was in Utah, my host kept me busy with a series of talks. I spoke at lunch to a room of 400 entrepreneurs and investors from the region about the business model / customer development stack. I was quite surprised to find the depth and interest in innovation and sheer number of startups that I saw. I was even more surprised to learn that University of Utah has gone from being ranked 94th in the U.S. for startups created from university intellectual property to number one.

When I met with the faculty and Deans at BYU they were proud to tell me that they were number one in the U.S. for startups, licenses, and patent applications per research dollar. BYU has embraced an e-school approach, changing their curriculum to develop and teach the ideas in the business model / customer development stack. Their vision is to make the Business Model Competition an even larger international event, creating competitions at partner schools and providing the materials and insight to create a network of business model competitions culminating in an international finals event. And they are ready to share!

Keep your eye out for more details about creating your own competition, or contact Nathan Furr directly.

Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Teaching, Venture Capital | 8 Comments »

The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Posted on December 7, 2010 by steve blank

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built.

They are going to get out of the building, build a company and get orders in ten weeks.

Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.) We have two great teaching assistants, plus we’ve rounded up a team of 25 mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) to help coach the teams.

Why Teach This Class?
Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.)

In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable businessmodel.)  There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) to optimize this search.

Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.” Others emphasize how to build a product. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that:  1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. are what make it a business,
2) business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers. In a startup none of these are known.

Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

What’s Different About the Class?
This Stanford class will introduce management tools for entrepreneurs.  We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Students will start by mapping their assumptions (their business model) and then each week test these hypotheses with customers and partners outside in the field (customer development) and use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product.

The goal is to get students out of the building to test each of the 9 parts of their business model, understand which of their assumptions were wrong, and figure out what they need to do fix it. Their objective is to get users, orders, customers, etc. (and if a web-based product, a minimum feature set,) all delivered in 10 weeks.  Our objective is to get them using the tools that help startups to test their hypotheses and make adjustments when they learn that their original assumptions about their business are wrong.  We want them to experience faulty assumptions not as a crisis, but as a learning event called a pivot —an opportunity to change the business model.

How’s the Class Organized?
During the first week of class, students form teams (optimally 4 people in a team but we’re flexible.) Their company can focus in any area– software, hardware, medical device or a service of any kind.

The class meets ten times, once a week for three hours. In those three hours we’ll do two things.  First, we’’ll lecture on one of the 9 building blocks of a business model (see diagram below, taken from Business Model Generation).  Secondly, each student team will present “lessons learned” from their team’s experience getting out of the building learning, testing, iterating and/or pivoting their business model.

They’ll share with the class answers to these questions:

  1. What did you initially think?
  2. So what did you do?
  3. Then what did you learn?
  4. What are you going to do next?

At the course’s end, each team will present their entire business model and highlight what they learned, their most important pivots and conclusions.

We’re going to be teaching it for the first time in January.  Below is the class syllabus.

——————–

Class 1  is here.  Follow along!

Engineering 245
This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a high-tech company. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It’s not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library. The end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works.  You’ll work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. You’ll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. Finally, you’ll see how agile development can help you rapidly iterate your product to build something customers will use and buy.  Each week will be new adventure as you test each part of your business model and then share the hard earned knowledge with the rest of the class. Working with your team you will encounter issues on how to build and work with a team and we will help you understand how to build and manage the startup team.

Besides the instructors and TA’s, each team will be assigned two mentors (an experienced entrepreneur and/or VC) to provide assistance and support.

Suggested Projects: While your first instinct may be a web-based startup we suggest that you consider a subject in which you are a domain expert, such as your graduate research. In all cases, you should choose something for which you have passion, enthusiasm, and hopefully some expertise.  Teams that select a web-based product will have to build the site for the class.

——————–

Pre-reading For 1st Class:  Read pages 1-51 of Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation.

Class 1    Jan 4th Intro/Business Model/Customer Development
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
What’s a business model? What are the 9 parts of a business model?  What are hypotheses? What is the Minimum Feature Set? What experiments are needed to run to test business model hypotheses?   What is market size? How to determine whether a business model is worth doing?

Deliverable: Set up teams by Thursday, Jan 6 (a mixer will be hosted on Wednesday to help finalize teams).  Submit your project for approval to the teaching team.

Read:

Deliverable for January 11th:

  • Write down hypotheses for each of the 9 parts of the business model.
  • Come up with ways to test:
    • is a business worth pursuing (market size)
    • each of the hypotheses
    • Come up with what constitutes a pass/fail signal for the test (e.g. at what point would you say that your hypotheses wasn’t even close to correct)?
    • Start your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Jan 6th 5-7pm Speed Dating  (Meet in Thornton 110)

Get quick feedback on your initial team business concept from the teaching team.

——————–
Class 2            Jan 11th Testing Value Proposition
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
What is your product or service? How does it differ from an idea? Why will people want it? Who’s the competition and how does your customer view these competitive offerings? Where’s the market? What’s the minimum feature set?  What’s the Market Type?  What was your inspiration or impetus?  What assumptions drove you to this?  What unique insight do you have into the market dynamics or into a technological shift that makes this a fresh opportunity?

Action:

  • Get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers face-to-face
  • Follow-up with Survey Monkey (or similar service) to get more data

Read:

  • Business Model Generation, pp. 161-168 and 226-231
  • Four Steps to the Epiphany, pp. 30-42, 65-72 and 219-223
  • The Blue Ocean Strategy pages 3-22

Deliverable for Jan 18th:

  • Find a name for your team.
  • What were your value proposition hypotheses?
  • What did you discover from customers?
  • Submit interview notes, present results in class.
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Class 3            Jan 18th Testing Customers/users
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
Who’s the customer? User? Payer?  How are they different? How can you reach them? How is a business customer different from a consumer?

Action:

  • Get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers face-to-face
  • Follow-up with Survey Monkey (or similar service) to get more data

Read:

Deliverable for Jan 25th:

  • What were your hypotheses about who your users and customers were? Did you learn anything different?
  • Submit interview notes, present results in class. Did anything change about Value Proposition?
  • What are your hypotheses around customer acquisition costs?  Can you articulate the direct benefits (economic or other) that are apparent?
  • If your customer is part of a company, who is the decision maker, how large is the budget they have authority over, what are they spending it on today, and how are they individually evaluated within that organization, and how will this buying decision be made?
  • What resonates with customers?
  • For web startups, start coding the product. Setup your Google or Amazon cloud infrastructure.
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Class 4            Jan 25th Testing Demand Creation
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
How do you create end user demand? How does it differ on the web versus other channels?   Evangelism vs. existing need or category? General Marketing, Sales Funnel, etc

Action:

  • If you’re building a web site:
    • Small portion of your site should be operational on the web
    • Small portion of your site should be operational on the web
  • Actually engage in “search engine marketing” (SEM)spend $20 as a team to test customer acquisition cost
    • Ask your users to take action, such as signing up for a newsletter
    • use Google Analytics to measure the success of your campaign
    • change messaging on site during the week to get costs lower, team that gets lowest delta costs wins.
    • If you’re assuming virality of your product, you will need to show viral propagation of your product and the improvement of your viral coefficient over several experiments.
  • If non-web,
    • build demand creation budget and forecast.
    • Get real costs from suppliers.

Read:

Watch: Mark Pincus, “Quick and Frequent Product Testing and Assessment”, http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2313

Deliverable for Feb 1st :

  • Submit interview notes, present results in class.
  • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users or Channel?
  • Present and explain your marketing campaign. What worked best and why?
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Class 5            Feb 1st Testing Channel
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
What’s a channel?  Direct channels, indirect channels, OEM. Multi-sided markets.  B-to-B versus B-to-C channels and sales (business to business versus business to consumer)

Action: If you’re building a web site, get the site up and running, including minimal feature.

  • For non-web products, get out of the building talk to 10-15 channel partners.

Read: Four Steps to the Epiphany, pp. 50-51, 91-94, 226-227, 256, 267

Deliverable for Feb 8th:

  • For web teams:
    • Get a working web site and analytics up and running. Track where your visitors are coming from (marketing campaign, search engine, etc) and how their behavior differs. What were your hypotheses about your web site results?
    • Submit web data or customer interview notes, present results in class.
    • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users?
    • What is your assumed customer lifetime value?  Are there any proxy companies that would suggest that this is a reasonable number?
    • For non-web teams:
      • Interview 10-15 people in your channel (salesmen, OEM’s, etc.).
      • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users?
      • What is your customer lifetime value?  Channel incentives – does your product or proposition extend or replace existing revenue for the channel?
      • What is the “cost” of your channel, and it’s efficiency vs. your selling price.
      • Everyone: Update your blog/wiki/journal.
        • What kind of initial feedback did you receive from your users?
        • What are the entry barriers?

——————–
Class 6            Feb 8th Testing Revenue Model
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
What’s a revenue model? What types of revenue streams are there? How does it differ on the web versus other channels?

Action: What’s your revenue model?

  • How will you package your product into various offerings if you have more than one?
  • How will you price the offerings?
  • What are the key financials metrics for your business model?
  • Test pricing in front of 100 customers on the web, 10-15 customers non-web.
  • What are the risks involved?
  • What are your competitors doing?

Read: John Mullins & Randy Komisar, Getting to Plan B (2009) pages 133-156

Deliverable for Feb 15th :

  • Assemble an income statement for the your business model. Lifetime value calculation for customers.
  • Submit interview notes, present results in class.
  • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users, Channel, Demand Creation, Revenue Model?
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Class 7            Feb 15th Testing Partners
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
Who are partners?  Strategic alliances, competition, joint ventures, buyer supplier, licensees.

Action: What partners will you need?

  • Why do you need them and what are risks?
  • Why will they partner with you?
  • What’s the cost of the partnership?
  • Talk to actual partners.
  • What are the benefits for an exclusive partnership?

Deliverable for Feb 22nd

  • Assemble an income statement for the your business model.
  • Submit interview notes, present results in class.
  • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users, Channel, Demand Creation?
  • What are the incentives and impediments for the partners?
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

——————–
Class 8            Feb 22nd Testing Key Resources & Cost Structure
Class Lecture/Out of the Building Assignment:
What resources do you need to build this business?  How many people? What kind? Any hardware or software you need to buy? Any IP you need to license?  How much money do you need to raise?  When?  Why? Importance of cash flows? When do you get paid vs. when do you pay others?

Action: What’s your expense model?

  • What are the key financials metrics for costs in your business model?
  • Costs vs. ramp vs. product iteration?
  • Access to resources. What is the best place for your business?
  • Where is your cash flow break-even point?

Deliverable for March 1st

  • Assemble a resources assumptions spreadsheet.  Include people, hardware, software, prototypes, financing, etc.
  • When will you need these resources?
  • Roll up all the costs from partners, resources and activities in a spreadsheet by time.
  • Submit interview notes, present results in class.
  • Did anything change about Value Proposition or Customers/Users, Channel, Demand Creation/Partners?
  • Update your blog/wiki/journal

Guest: Alexander Osterwalder

For March 1st or 8th

——————–
Class 9            March 1st Team Presentations of Lessons Learned (1st half of the class)

Deliverable: Each team will present a 30 minute “Lessons Learned” presentation about their business.

——————–
Class 10            March 8th Team Presentations of Lessons Learned (2nd half of the class)

Deliverable: Each team will present a 30 minute “Lessons Learned” presentation about their business.

——————–
March 11th 1-4pm Demo Day at VC Firm (Location TBD)

Show off your product to the public and real VC’s.  Set up a booth, put up posters, run demos, etc.  Food and refreshments provided.

Class 1  is here.  Follow along!

——————–
Mentor List (as of Dec 3rd 2010)

Class 1  is here.  Follow along!
Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 71 Comments »

Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better Way

Posted on November 18, 2010 by steve blank

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) and being continually surprised when it didn’t.

That’s the definition of insanity. Luckily most startups now realize there is a better way.

Startups Are Not Small Versions of Large Companies
As we described in previous posts, startups fail on the day they’re founded if they are organized and managed like they are a small version of a large company. In an existing company with existing customers you 1) understand the customers problem and 2) since you do, you can specify the entire feature set on day one. But startups aren’t large companies, but for decades VC’s insisted that startups organize and plan like they were.

These false assumptions – that you know the customer problem and product features – led startups to organize their product introduction process like the diagram below – essentially identical to the product management process of a large company. In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship.


The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption
Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. The revenue numbers and revenue model came from a startups original Business Plan. A business plan has a set of assumptions (who’s the customer, what’s the price, what’s the channel, what are the product features that matter, etc.) that make up a business model. All of these initial assumptions must be right for the revenue plan to be correct. Yet by first customer ship most of the business model hasn’t been validated or tested. Yet startups following the traditional product introduction model are organized to execute the business plan as if it were fact.

Unless you were incredibly lucky most of your assumptions are wrong. What happens next is painful, predictable, avoidable, yet built into to every startup business plan.

Ritualized Crises
Trying to execute a startup revenue plan is why crises unfold in a stylized, predicable ritual after first customer ship.

You can almost set your watch to six months or so after first customer ship, when Sales starts missing its “numbers,” the board gets concerned and Marketing tries to “make up a better story.” The web site and/or product presentation slides start changing and Marketing and Sales try different customers, different channels, new pricing, etc. Having failed to deliver the promised revenue, the VP of Sales in a startup who does not make the “numbers” becomes an ex-VP of Sales. (The half-life of the first VP of sales of a startup is ~18 months.)

Now the company is in crisis mode because the rest of the organization (product development, marketing, etc.) has based its headcount and expenses on the business plan, expecting Sales to make its numbers. Without the revenue to match its expenses, the company is in now danger of running out of money.

Pivots By Firing Executives
A new VP of Sales (then VP of Marketing, then CEO) looks at their predecessors’ strategy, and if they are smart, they do something different (they implement a different pricing model, pick a new sales channel, target different customers and/or partners, reformulate the product features, etc.)

Surprisingly we have never explicitly articulated or understood that what’s really happening when we hire a new VP or CEO in a startup is that the newly hired executive is implicitly pivoting (radically changing) some portion of the business model.  We were changing the business model when we changed executives.

Startups were pivoting by crisis and firing executives.  Yikes.

Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack
The alternative to the traditional product introduction process is the Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack. It assumes the purpose of a startup is the search for a business model (not execution.) This approach has a startup drawing their initial business model hypotheses on the Business Model Canvas.

Each of the 9 business model building blocks has a set of hypotheses that need to be tested. The Customer Development process is then used to test each of the 9 building blocks of the business model. Each block in the business model canvas maps to hypotheses in the Customer Discovery and Validation steps of Customer Development.

Simultaneously the engineering team is using an Agile Development methodology to iteratively and incrementally build the Minimum Feature Set to test the product or service that make up the Value Proposition.

Pivots Versus Crises
If we accept that startups are engaged in the search for a business model, we recognize that radical shifts in a startups business model are the norm, rather than the exception.

This means that instead of firing an executive every time we discover a faulty hypothesis, we expect it as a normal course of business.

Why it’s not a crisis is that the Customer Development process says, “do not staff and hire like you are executing. Instead keep the burn rate low during Customer Discovery and Validation while you are searching for a business model.”  This low burn rate allows you to take several swings at the bat (or shots on the goal, depending on your country.) Each pivot gets you smarter but doesn’t put you out of business. And when you finally find a scalable and repeatable model, you exit Customer Validation, pour on the cash and scale the company.

Lessons Learned

  • “I know the Customer problem” and “I know the features to build” are rarely true on day one in a startup
  • These hypotheses lead to a revenue plan that is untested, yet becomes the plan of record.
  • Revenue shortfalls are the norm in a startup yet they create a crisis. 
  • The traditional solution to a startup crisis is to remove executives. Their replacements implicitly iterate the business model.
  • The alternative to firing and crises is the Business Model/Customer Development process.
  • It says faulty hypotheses are a normal part of a startup
  • We keep the burn rate low while we search and pivot allowing for multiple iterations of the business model.
  • No one gets fired.

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Creating Startup Success – Customer Development + Business Model Design

Posted on November 15, 2010 by steve blank

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies.

Alexander Osterwalder, who authored the Business Model Generation book, put together a slidedeck on his thoughts of what happens when you combine the business model concept to shape and structure your business ideas with the Customer Development approach to test, prove and build them.

I think his slides are great (and by far much easier on the eye then mine.)

Teaching In the Big Apple
I was in New York teaching at Columbia University this week and gave a few talks around town. A nice surprise was an invite to crash a dinner in progress with Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, and Joanne Wilson. (Funny to learn latter that someone at the next table was listening to our conversation and tweeting it.)

My public talk at Columbia University was part of their Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Startup lecture series. Thanks to an invite by Professor Chris Wiggins in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Department (but better known as the founder of HackNY), I was honored to be shoe-horned in between Mark Suster who appeared the day before and Peter Thiel, who was going to present the next day.

It was great to see my ex Stanford teaching assistant Christina Cacioppo, now at Union Square Ventures, in the audience. (She posted her notes from the talk here.) Now I have an ex teaching assistant in VC firms on both coasts.

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Get Out of The Building – And Win $50,000

Posted on November 11, 2010 by steve blank

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 learned enough about entrepreneurship as its own management science, to rethink our approach on how to teach it.

A place to start would be by recognizing the fundamental difference between an existing company and a startup: existing companies executebusiness models, while startups searchfor a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable businessmodel.) Therefore the very foundations of teaching entrepreneurship should start with how to search for a business model.

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This solution stack proposes that entrepreneurs should first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test whether these hypotheses are accurate, outside in the field (customer development) and then use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis, it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to update the business model.

Business Model Design meets Customer Development

Lean Launchpad
So how do we teach this approach? Both Stanford and Berkeley have been extremely generous in letting me test these ideas in their engineering and business schools. In fact, starting in January, Stanford will offer Engineering 245, a.k.a the Lean Launchpad, the first hands-on class utilizing the entire business model/customer development / agile development stack. I’ll be teaching this class with two world-class VC’s:  Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, and Jon Feiber of MDV.

In this class students get real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a high-tech company. This class is not about how to write a business plan. The end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. Instead students get their hands dirty talking to customers, partners and competitors as they encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works.  They’ll work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. They’ll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone would want/use their product. Finally, they’ll use agile development to rapidly iterate the product in class to build something customers will use and buy.  Each week will be a new adventure as they test each part of their business model and then share the hard earned knowledge with the rest of the class.

But what if you’re not a Stanford student and want to learn how to build a startup with the “get out of the building” experience as taught in the Lean Launchpad class?

You can.

International Business Model Competition
One of the things I have suggested is that instead of business plan competitions (which tend to focus on a static plan which is often just a series of guesses about a customer problem and the product solution), entrepreneurship educators should think about holding competitions that emulate what entrepreneurs encounter – chaos, uncertainty and unknowns. A business model competition would emulate the “out of the building” experience of the Stanford E-245 class and the customer development / business model / agile stack.

Nathan Furr, a professor at Brigham Young University, is launching the firstinternational business model competition.

The competition will be held on January 24th 2011 (submission deadline Jan 10th) and is open to university students enrolled at least half-time anywhere in the world (more about the competition here and information packet is here). While Professor Furr’s vision is to make this the Moot Corp (the championship of business plan competitions) of the business model world, the broader goal is to kick start change in the way students and educators think about how to train the next generation of entrepreneurs—Durant entrepreneurs.

Not only is this an exciting event planting a flag for the future of e-schools, but Alexander Osterwalder, who wrote the definitive book on business model design, and I will be doing the judging along with Professor Nathan Furr.

Oh yes, and by the way, the prize money is $50,000.

See you there.
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Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Teaching | 19 Comments »

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.

Posted on November 1, 2010 by steve blank

At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere on earth. It would cover every city, town and square inch of the earth from ships in the middle of the Arctic Ocean to the jungles of Africa to the remote mountain peaks of the Himalayas. And Iridium would do this without building a single cell tower.

How? With an out-of-this-world business plan. First, the company bought a fleet of 15 rockets from Russia, the U.S. and China.  Next, it  built 72 satellites on an assembly line and used the rockets to launch them into orbit 500 miles above the earth. There the satellites acted like 500-mile high cell phone towers capable of providing phone coverage to any spot on the planet. Seven years after it was founded their satellites and ground stations were in place.  It was a technical tour de force.

iridium satellite network

But nine months after the first call was made in 1998, Iridium was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It crashed back down to earth as one of the largest startup failures on record. What went wrong?

We Think We Identified a Large Problem
When Iridium was first conceived inside Motorola in 1987, worldwide cell phone coverage was sparse, calls were unreliable and per minute costs were expensive. Cell phone handsets were the size of a lunch box and cost thousands of dollars.

Motorola Dynatac 8000x ~1987

When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. All were predicated on the state of the mobile phone industry in 1990. They made other assumptions about the type of sales channel, partnerships and revenue model they would need. And they rolled all of this up into a set of financial forecasts with a “size of market” forecast from brand name management consulting firms that said they’d have 42 million customers by 2002. Iridium looked like it would be printing money when it got its satellites into space.

A Business Plan Frozen in Time
But in the 11 years it took Iridium to go from concept to launch, innovation in mobile phones and cell phone networks moved at blinding speed. By the time Iridium launched, there were far fewer places on the planet where cell phone service was unavailable. Traditional cell phone companies now had coverage in the most valuable parts of the world. Prices for local and international cell service declined dramatically. The size of a cell phone handset had shrunk so it could fit in your pocket.

In contrast, when Iridium’s service became available its satellite phone was bigger than a brick and weighed about the same.

iridium-9500 satellite phone ~1999

Worse, Iridium’s cell phone couldn’t make calls from cars, offices or other buildings since phones had to be used outdoors with a line-of-sight connection to the satellites. But the nail in the coffin was price. Instead of the 50 cents per minute for a regular cell phone, Iridium’s calls cost $7 per minute– plus users needed to pay $3,000 for the handset.

In the eleven years since they had been at work, Iridium’s potential market had shrunk nearly every day. But Iridium’s business model assumptions were fixed like it was still 1990. They were dead on arrival as a mass market cell phone service the day they went live.

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer
The result was a classic startup failure writ large. Iridium followed its original business plan assumptions off a cliff. Their mistakes?  First, in 1990 the company thought it knew the customer problem to solve, and therefore it  knew what solution to build.

Second, since it knew the solution, it went into a 8-year Waterfall engineering development process. Waterfall development is a sequential way to develop a product (requirements, design, implementation, verification – ship.) Waterfall makes lots of sense in a market with the customer problem is known and all customer needs and product features can be specified up front. It is death in a rapidly changing business. Waterfall development shut off Iridium’s ability to listen, learn, test and adapt to changing customer needs and a rapidly changing market place.

Third, its business plan had no notion of learning and discovery. The idea of iteration or pivots was unthinkable. This business plan was a static document.  It was great for fundraising, looked great in business schools and large companies, but completely broke down when confronted by the realities of the changing mobile phone business.  When the company launched, it ran into diminishing customers and markets that didn’t correspond to its business plan and financial projections, but it had no ability to pivot and change their business model.  A Customer Discovery and Validation process that was ongoing with product development could have provided early warning that its market was not developing in Iridium’s favor.  Instead management was more comfortable executing to the plan.

It All Came Crashing Down
All this, plus the corporate hubris of having raised billions of dollars, with no adult on either Iridum’s or Motorola’s board who was asking “does this still make sense?” resulted in a disaster. Instead of the 42 million customers called for in its business plan, Iridium had 30,000 subscribers at its peak. The company burned its way through more than $5.2-billion because it fell in love with technology, succumbed to Waterfall product development and never bothered to get out of the building, get their heads out of their spreadsheets and ask, “What do customers want today?”

In 2000, new investors bought Iridium’s satellites and network for $25-million, or one half of one percent of the invested capital. Today, the successor company serves some 300,000 customers in a series of niche markets including American soldiers calling home from war zones, oil rig managers, and big game hunters.

Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development could have changed the outcome.

Lessons Learned

  • Business plans are the leading cause of startup death
  • No Business Plan survives first contact with a customer
  • Rapidly changing markets require continuous business model iteration/customer development
  • Your ability to raise money has no correlation with customer adoption

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Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development | 43 Comments »

Checklists for Chaos, The Path to Success

Posted on October 28, 2010 by steve blank

In a startup the search for a business model is chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. In addition it explicitly calls for synchronization and confirmation of the steps by the entire team.

Surely a checklist and discussion gets in the way of progress in a fast moving startup? Here’s how using it helped E.piphany rather than hindered it.

Tell Them What You’re Hearing
When E.piphany was a small struggling startup in Mountain View, we had a weekly Friday afternoon beer and wine fest, no different than what hundreds of other startups were doing. (Insurance companies in the valley should check the accident rates for Friday traffic.) The company headcount was mostly engineers accomplishing the impossible on a regular basis while a few of us were outside the building trying to do what we would call today Customer Discovery and Validation.

A Checklist for Chaos
While all startups are chaotic, we had been through enough of them (E.piphany was my 8th) to realize that we could understand our potential customer better if we had a standard checklist and process of how to approach complex enterprise sales. These started with the business model hypotheses in Customer Discovery (who’s the customer, channel, pricing model, etc.)

Customer Hypothesis Checklist

I remember that for the first few weeks of the company, my partner Ben and I would give the usual rah-rah platitudes about how great things were going to motivate the engineers.  Then one week Ben turned to me and said, “Why don’t you really tell them what you’re doing and what you’re hearing.”  Uh oh. Thinking about all the ups and downs of sales in a startup and twists and turns in strategy and positioning I wondered if it would be demoralizing. “Do you think they can handle the truth?”  We talked about it and realized our motto for our weekly meeting would be, “Don’t panic when we change the strategy. Only panic if we ask you to rearchitect the product.”  (Today’s version would be “Don’t worry when we pivot the business model, only panic if we ask you to develop the product with a Waterfall methodology.”)

Sharing the Checklist
Soon after, our Friday’s meetings would start with me describing the highs and lows of the week: who we called on, what they said and what happened (essentially walking engineering through the series of checklists as we went through Customer Discovery and Validation. And what I had to report was mostly us getting a “not interested” or “we don’t get it” from a prospective customer.

Almost immediately the most unexpected things started happening at our Friday meetings.

Don’t Treat Them Like Mushrooms
First, I thought that not pumping up engineering every week would demotivate the team. Reality turned out 180 degrees from what I expected. Engineering was much smarter. When it became clear that my partner and I were not going to treat them like mushrooms (keep them in the dark and feed them sx!t) but let them know what was really going on, they engaged on a much different level.

You’re Explaining it Wrong
Second, as I was reporting on my sales calls a few of the engineers realized that I was describing technical professionals in large companies who were just like them. When I detailed how I was explaining the product, our own engineers said, “You’re explaining it wrong. Even I wouldn’t buy it from us if you told me that.” The first time I heard that I was speechless. Who the hell were these engineers telling me how to market and sell our product?  My first instinct was to cycle through all the “my business card says I’m the expert here and you just write code.”

Then I realized – they were right. Our engineers were just like the customer, and if they didn’t think our product description made sense, no one else would.  So in front of the entire company, I threw out our positioning and we started to discuss how to better articulate what we were doing. (I think we invented our meta-data architecture diagram that Friday.) It was great to realize that instead of just me trying to figure out customer feedback, that every Friday I’d have the collective wisdom of engineering engaged.

Confirming the Checklist
Synchronizing our Discovery and Validation had a third benefit. Engineering now felt that they had a stake in making the process better and took a great interest in that mysterious and elusive “customer.”  Soon engineers were spending lots of time talking to customers. More importantly they had a vested interest in getting the process right.

Synchronizing the Discovery and Validation checklists with the entire company made us collectively smarter, faster and gave us a shared understanding of our objective – build great products that customers wanted.

Checklists and synchronization were part of the reason why we grew from $0 to $125 million in three years.

Lessons Learned

  • Customer Discovery and Validation in any type of startup requires a series of checklists (see Appendix B of the Four Steps to the Epiphany)
  • The checklists require the team to share their findings for confirmation and synchronization

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Entrepreneurship as a Science – The Business Model/Customer Development Stack

Posted on October 25, 2010 by steve blank

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. Then they adopted standard microprocessors (e.g. x86, ARM.) At the same time every computer company was writing its own operating system.  Soon standard operating systems (e.g. Windows, Linux) emerged. In the last decade open source software (e.g LAMP) emerged for building web servers.

Each time a standard solution emerged, innovation didn’t stop. It just allowed new innovation to begin at a higher level.

In this post I want offer a solution stack for Entrepreneurship. It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development.

Business Model Design
Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.”  Some use it with certainty like they know what it means. Others use it with an implied question mark realizing they don’t have a clue to its components.

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur defined a business model as how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. More importantly they showed how any company’s business model could be defined in 9 boxes. It’s an amazing and powerful tool.  It instantly creates a shared visual language while defining a business.  Their book “Business Model Generation,” is the definitive text on the subject.  (And their forthcoming Business Model Toolbox is a killer iPad app for business strategy.)

Business Model Canvas

Yet as powerful as the Business Model Canvas (a template with the nine blocks of a business model) is, at the end of the day it was a tool for brainstorming hypotheses without a formal way of testing them.

Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic
One of the key tenets of Customer Development is that your business model is nothing more than a set of untested hypotheses.  Yet Customer Development has no structured and systematic way of describing a business model.

In the last year I found that the Osterwalder Business Model canvas could be used for something much more than a static planning tool.  I realized that it was the launch-pad for setting up the hypotheses to test, and a scorecard for visually tracking iterations and Pivots during Customer Discovery and Validation.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world Alexander Osterwalder was coming to the same conclusion: tying the two processes together would create a “strategy stack for entrepreneurship.”  We got together this weekend (along with our partners Alan Smith and Bob Dorf and my student Max Marmer) to try to integrate the two.

Business Model Design Meets Customer Development
In its simplest form the way to think about the intersection of the two processes is that you start by designing your business model.  Next, each one of the 9 business model canvas boxes then directly translates into a set of Customer Discovery hypotheses that are described in Customer Development and the Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Business Model Design meets Customer Development

Pivots and Iterations
Many entrepreneurs assume that the assumptions in their original business model (or business plan if they wrote one) will be correct.  Confronting the reality that one of these hypotheses is wrong (finding out you have the wrong sales channel, revenue model, target market or customer) creates a crisis.

Pivots are Business Model Insights

Tying Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas with the Customer Development process turns these potential crises into learning opportunities called the Pivot. Customer Development forces you to get out of the building and discover and validate each one of the assumptions behind the business model. A Pivot is when reality leads you to change one or more business model hypotheses.  The result is an updated business model not a fired VP of Sales.

The Pivot turns a failed business model hypotheses into insight.

The Business Model/Customer Development Stack
We’ll have more to say about combing these two methodologies in future posts.

Lessons Learned

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No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions

Posted on May 17, 2010 by steve blank

Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. They called back laughing and the invitation disappeared.

At best I think business plan competitions are a waste of time. But until now I haven’t been able to articulate a framework of why or had a concrete suggestion of what to replace them with.

Now I do.

Business Plan Versus Business Models
Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from?  A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. The plan describes the execution strategy for addressing these “knowns.”  In the early days of venture capital, investors and entrepreneurs were familiar with the format of business plans from large company and adopted it for startups. Without much thought it has been used ever since.

It turns out that’s a mistake.  A startup is not executing a series of knowns. Most startups are facing unknown customer needs, an unknown product feature set and is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  That means that writing a static business plan adds no value to starting a company, as the plan does not represent the iterative nature of the search for the model. A simple way to think about it is that in a startup no business plan survives first contact with customers.

Instead of business plans I have suggested that startups use business models.

Business models are dynamic and reflect the iterative reality that startups face. Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the Pivots in their search for a repeatable business model.

Business Plan Competitions are Great for Schools and Bad For Students
Almost every university, region and car wash now has a business plan competition; the rules, who can participate, how large the prizes and who are the judges vary by school.

Business plan competitions perpetuate everything that is wrong about trying to make plans that were designed to be used in large companies fit startups. (One of my favorites: “Judging will include such factors as: Market opportunity, reward to risk, strategy, implementation plan, financing plan, etc.”) All of which may be true in large companies. But little of it is relevant to the chaos and uncertainty in the life of a startup.

Yet an ever increasing number of schools keep holding Business Plan competitions.  Why?

  • They’re a match for the “How to write a business plan” classes that are offered.
  • It makes the school appear relevant to their constituencies; students, donors, faculty, VC’s.
  • Business plans are easy to grade, score and judge.
  • Schools can get Venture Firms to fund prizes for the best business plan.
  • Venture Firms use the contests as another source of deal flow and talent.
  • There is no alternative.

The irony is that business plan competitions ought to be held for plans from large companies not for startups.

The Alternative – Business Model Competitions
I’ll offer that to be useful for startups Business Plan competitions need to turn into Business Model competitions. A Business Model competition has a radically different goal than writing a business plan.  The Business Model competition measures how well students learn how to Pivot by getting outside the building (not by writing a plan inside one.)

Each team would be judged by their business model presentation on these five steps.

  1. What did you initially think your initial business model was? (initial business model hypotheses)
  2. What did you build/do? (built first product, talked to users, etc.)
  3. What did you learn outside the building? (parts of our feature set/business model were wrong)
  4. Then what did you do? (iterated product, changed business model, etc.)
  5. Repeat steps 1-4

The business model would be scored and judged based on steps 3 and 4.  And extra credit for multiple times through the loop.

For the first time we’d have a competition that closely resembled the reality that founders face, rather than a creative writing exercise.

There are now examples of business model presentations on the web. They were also at the heart of the Startup Lessons Learned conference.

——–

I’ll be happy to hand out the prizes at the first competition.  Lets call it the “Pivot Award for Excellence.”

Lessons Learned

  • Business plans are the wrong tool to search for a startup business model
  • They are best suited for large companies
  • Yet we have startup business plan contests
  • Experienced entrepreneurs know that business model iteration and validation occurs outside the building
  • Some school will be first to hold a contest that rewards what matters

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