The Bad Board Member

Posted on January 19, 2011 by steve blank

Over the last 40 years the U.S. has evolved an entrepreneurial ecosystem with two of the most unlikely partners – venture capital investors and technology entrepreneurs. This alliance has led to an explosion of technology innovation, scalable startups and job creation.

Tied at the hip, VC’s and entrepreneurs take large risks together. VC’s invest in startups with minimal tangible assets and no certainty about the product’s viability, market size or customer adoption. Entrepreneurs face all that, and add one more risk to their list: the bad board member.

The Bad Board Member
I had coffee last week with one of my ex students. 30 months ago he raised a Series A venture round from two name brand Silicon Valley VC firms. It was early in the day, but he looked tired. “I need some advice about my board. I get along great with one of the VC’s, but the other one, Bob, is making my life miserable. Nothing I do is right in his eyes.” He looked pained as he continued. “We never had any personal chemistry, and it’s gotten so bad in the last six months, our board meetings are just hell. They consist of Bob beating me up regardless of whether the results are good or bad. I can’t tell if he’s trying to get me to quit, fire me and bring on a new CEO or is just a miserable human being.”

My antenna went up when I heard that Bob was his board member because the senior partner who led the investment said he was too busy to take another board seat (and right after the closing had assigned Bob to take the seat for his firm.)

Uh oh, I thought. I lived through this one. Admittedly, my ex student was quirky, bordering on eccentric, but he had a long and successful track record in Silicon Valley delivering complex products before he went back to get his MBA. He was a great engineering manager and recruited, hired and inspired a world-class team. This was his first CEO job. He said that Bob described him to others on the board as the “crazy aunt you hide in the closet when the guests come.”

We went through the status of the company, and at least from the outside it sounded good. In fact it sounded great: three major versions of the product shipped, multiple iterations and a few pivots under their belt, revenue was growing even faster than plan.

“Well you just need to talk to your other board members and ask for their counsel,” I offered.  “I did! I’ve talked to the other VC and he told me it’s a problem that I just need to work out with Bob.“ Hmm, this wasn’t sounding good. “Why don’t you go back to the partner who led the deal and ask for his advice?”

The look on his face told me I knew what the answer would be. “Why do you think I’m having breakfast with you?  I did just that, and do you know what he said?” I sat there thinking I knew exactly what the senior VC said because I had heard it myself when I was an entrepreneur. “The senior partner at the firm said he wasn’t going to get involved in “chemistry” issues.” Sounding both sad and frustrated he said, “What do I do now? I built a great company, and I think I’m being set up to be fired.”

The VC Lemon Law
Every Venture Capitalist I’ve heard talk about founder/board member problems treats them like they only happen in other funds. “Great VC’s in brand name firms don’t have these problems” is the line I hear.

The venture capital industry is in denial.

The problem is as bad in large brand name funds as in the smaller firms. While most board problems arise from founder performance issues, naiveté or disagreements about strategy, a number are created by bad behavior on the part of a board member. Yet while a VC can remove a founder who misbehaves, there is no corresponding recourse when a VC is the source of the problem.

Astonishingly, there’s no professional standards in the venture capital industry that acknowledges this problem even exists. Not only does the industry lack a code of conduct, but individual venture firms lack avenues for founders/CEOs to bring these problems to light. There’s no ombudsman or 3rd party in a firm to hear an objective review, and no remedy to deal with a partner’s bad behavior. (And why would there be if the problems are only with the founders.)

The rationale seems to be rooted in both tradition and math. Like doctors VC’s tend to bury their mistakes. If a partner screws up a single company in a portfolio it’s not the end of the world since they have 20-30 companies in a fund.  If a single partner has a consistently terrible track record, he or she just won’t be invited into the next fund.  But in the meantime this bad board member has left a trail of broken companies. When it comes time to understand individual partner performance, information asymmetry is at play – like bad doctors, knowledge about a partner’s performance is limited—and entrepreneurs rarely have a say in the matter even if they do have some knowledge.

Finally, there’s more than a whiff of noblesse oblige at play. If firms believe that VC’s always act responsibly and the problems are always with the founders, they don’t need to worry about bad board member behavior. They can continue to pretend it never occurs.

The reality is that the VC business has expanded from the clubby group of 20 or so firms that sat on Sand Hill Road 40 years ago into an industry of ~400.  My hope is that they realize that with that expansion comes a different set of responsibilities.

Lessons Learned

  • Most Entrepreneur/VC clashes arise from founder performance issues
  • Infrequently the cause is bad behavior from a board member
  • Currently founders have no recourse
  • After 40 years of growth the VC industry still operates with “small club” rules and mindset

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Filed under: Venture Capital | 29 Comments »

The Cover-Up Culture

Posted on January 10, 2011 by steve blank

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”

There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-up’s are so ingrained that we take them for granted.

Yet for a startup a cover-up culture is death. In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set.

Lie to My Face
The first time I saw a corporate cover-up was as a new board member of a medium size public company. The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later. The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) I knew this from talking to his people before the board meeting so none of this was a surprise. What was a surprise was the boldface lies the VP told us at the board meeting. “The product’s on schedule. No problems. We’ll make the numbers.” The disconnect between reality and a senior executive’s willingness to blatantly lie to his CEO and board just blew me away.

It would have been so much simpler for him to say, “We’re screwed, and I need your help.” Until I dug deeper and realized that the entire company had a “cover-up culture” – the CEO punished failure and bad news. Since only good news was rewarded (as defined by the revenue and product plan shared with Wall Street analysts,) I understood why avoiding bad news and covering mistakes was the general manager’s rational choice in this company. Because earlier in my career I had a board that beat me senseless when I missed a milestone.

Cover-up Or Look Like an Idiot
In large companies executives are hired and compensated for pristine and efficient execution. If you screw up, there’s an unspoken assumption that you’ve screwed up a known process – something that was repeatable and predictable. You cover up because your screw-ups not only make you look like a failure, but everyone up the line (your boss, their boss, etc.) look like an idiot. Further, the odds are that the information you hide won’t immediately be discovered or damage the company.

I mention this not because this post is about cover-ups in large companies, (I’ll leave that to the experts in organizational behavior and social theory) but to contrast it with the very different kind of culture that startups need to survive.

The Cover-Up Culture: The Role of the Board
As a founder I quickly learned how open I could be with my board. A few times I had not so great investors who believed that a startup should unfold like a Harvard case study. They ignored the reality that most startups are a chaotic set of events from which founders are trying to extract a repeatable and profitable pattern. The first time I delivered bad news I got my head handed to me. The lesson this chastened CEO took from that board meeting? Don’t tell this board bad news.

In other startups I was lucky and had great investors who knew how to manage and deal with chaos. They realized that conditions change so rapidly that the original business plan hypotheses becomes irrelevant. These investors taught me metrics appropriate forsearching for a business model, how to work with the board when I didn’t make a milestone, and how we would figure out when it was time to change the strategy. I thought of these board members as partners and I shared everything with them; good, bad and ugly.

These board members encouraged me to instill the right culture in the company. They reminded me that failures in startups tell the founders which direction not to pursue – while teaching you how to succeed. This means covering up failure in a startup was like tossing their money in the street. So instead of a cover-up culture they encouraged a “Lessons Learned culture.”

Startups: Good News Needs to Travel Fast, but Bad News Needs to Travel Faster
A key element of a “Lessons Learned” culture is rapid dissemination of information. All information, whether good or bad, must be shared rapidly. We taught our company that understanding sales losses were more important than understanding sales wins; understanding why a competitor’s products were better was more important than rationalizing ways in which ours were superior. All news, but especially bad news, needed to be shared, dissected, understood, and acted on. At each weekly department and company meeting we discussed what worked and hadn’t. And when we found employees who hoarded information or covered up problems we removed them. They were cultural poison for a startup.

The resulting conversations made us smarter, agile and relentless.

Lessons Learned

  • Startups are built around rapid iterations of hypotheses. Most of them turn out be wrong
  • Make sure your board is not beating up on the truth
  • Build a culture of rapid dissemination of all news; good or bad
  • Founders lead by example in sharing Lessons Learned
  • Collectively analyze failures,then iterate, pivot and try again
  • A cover-up culture is death to a startup
  • Fire employees who hoard information or hide bad news

Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation | 27 Comments »

Now Hear This

Posted on January 6, 2011 by steve blank

Much like my career, in the last two years this blog has traveled a serendipitous path. I orignally wrote it with four goals in mind:

  • First, to explain to my kids, then just graduating from High School, stories about their dad’s life when he was their age. And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.)
  • Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade.
  • Third, to share both thinking and practice as I learned how to teach entrepreneurs (the way one teaches artists and musicians.)
  • Fourth, as a public official in the State of California, to offer a window on how public policy on California Coastal protection gets made. The Coastal stories are going to have to wait until I’m no longer a public official. (With Jerry Brown as our new governor I’m up for reappointment so you might get to hear the stories soon, or may have to wait a bit longer.)

On my first day as a blogger I got 20 views. Now I’ve had days with 20 viewers per minute. So Happy New Year to my 100,000-plus monthly readers throughout the world, and to many more who read my posts via some of the most important media in the startup/tech/entrepreneurship world, in more languages and places than I can keep track of.

Now Hear This
For 2011, I’m glad to announce that you can now hear my blog posts via a podcast that you can subscribe to, download or have emailed to you a few days after each blog post goes live. An innovative entrepreneur put his company to work delivering the podcasts with his compliments. Marcos Polanco, founder of Clearshore and himself a serial entrepreneur, “never found time to read the blog, no matter how much I loved it. “I told Steve” said Marcus, “in true hacker fashion, I was too lazy to read his blog, and I figured others must be in the same spot, so I proposed to turn the blog into a podcast instead.”

Marcos has agreed that the list of podcast subscribers will never be rented, sold or traded to anyone (same goes with our own email list). His big payoff from this effort is the chance to put a few lines of copy about his latest venture, Clearshore, at the bottom of each podcast link email. Clearshore is a “matchmaker” that helps small businesses get their fair share of the $60-billion US government budget for R&D and innovation. Today, startups receive only 4% of those funds, something Clearshore–now in the customer discovery phase–is out to change.

To add your email to the free podcast alert service, click here.

Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

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Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment

Posted on January 4, 2011 by steve blank

I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile, which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program, spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Division.

I got smarter about the world outside of Silicon Valley, met some wonderful people who made me feel part of their family and shared some thoughts about entrepreneurship.

This post is a personal view of what I saw in what I call “Chilecon Valley” — in no way does it represent the views of the fine institutions I teach at. Read this with all the usual caveats: visiting a place for a few weeks doesn’t make you an expert (heck I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 30 years and I’m still surprised), I’m not an economist, and the odds are I misunderstood or misinterpreted what I saw or just didn’t see enough.

Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment
Chile has decided that it wants to be an innovation hub in South America.

In my short time in Chile, I spent time meeting with:

The good news:
Entrepreneurship and innovation is being talked about continually in Chile. This isn’t some small-time effort. The country is dead serious in all levels of government and universities about making this happen. They’ve been thinking hard and smart about the lessons to be learned not only from Silicon Valley, but with only 16 million people, they are also looking for lessons from other small innovation clusters such as Israel, Singapore and Finland. These countries are great models of countries too small to sustain startups of scale on just domestic consumption yet have managed to create innovation with a global reach.

What needs work:
As an outsider I was incredibly impressed with how far Chile has progressed in making the country an innovation hub. However I had questions about the challenges that still needed to be addressed.

Venture Capital
Perhaps it was just who I was meeting, but for a country so focused on innovation and startups the lack of venture capitalists was noticeable. Given the interesting things going on in the engineering labs I visited and the startups I met, one would have thought the place would have been crawling with VC’s fighting over deals. Instead it felt like the government – through CORFO – was doing most of the risk capital investing. Given that great VC’s are much, much more than just a bag of money, this means that startups lack experienced board members with practical experience. There seemed to be very few who knew how to coach entrepreneurs and to build companies. Finally, it wasn’t clear if everyone was on the same page; that for a Chilean startup to scale it was going to have to reach past Chile and go global. There seemed to be few tools, techniques and strategies to do so.

A sign of progress will be when some of the CORFO guys leave the government and start their own VC firms.

Corporate Connections
Entrepreneurship in Chile seems to be disconnected from the country’s largest industries and core resources. The clearest example is the country’s copper mining industry, which contributes 20% of the Chilean Gross Domestic Product. (Chile produces 35% of the world’s mined cooper.) The largest company, the state-run Chilean National Copper Corp CODELCO, has $23 billion in sales. Yet the copper companies import nearly 100% of the advanced technology they use. Interestingly, CODELCO is required to contribute 10% of its revenues to the armed forces, but the mining industry seems to have little or no connection with innovation and entrepreneurship efforts in universities and startups. (Perhaps it’s because the Ministry responsible for Mining is separate from the Ministry responsible for the Economy and Innovation.)

I suggested that Chile’s mining industry could contribute to building innovation leadership by funding a multi-tiered initiative in the country’s leading universities:

  1. Professional management training (obvious and immediate payback)
  2. Applied engineering (top 10 annual challenges from the mining companies)
  3. Basic research (copper based materials science, robotics, materials handling)

Small Business versus Scalable Startup versus Corporate Entrepreneurship
There’s confusion in both the Government and Universities about the difference between small business entrepreneurship (startups designed to be family businesses,) scalable startup entrepreneurship (startups designed from day one to scale big inside Chile and then expand globally) and corporate entrepreneurship.

I suggested that they think about educating (and funding) each class of entrepreneurs differently and realize different regions of Chile have different needs.  In Santiago the concept that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and traditional business school classes and methods don’t apply, is starting to take hold and will help shape how they educate entrepreneurs. In contrast, over lunch with the governor of Ultima Esperanza (the “Last Hope” province on the Southern tip of Chile,) it became clear that there’s a pressing need for training and education in small business entrepreneurship, dramatically different then the scalable startup education wanted in Santiago.

These three types of entrepreneurship need to be explicitly recognized, encouraged and managed.

A Magnet For Talent
My sense is that Chile has not yet “declared a major.” Saying that you support entrepreneurship and innovation is a start, but the sentence needs to be finished. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what field?  Where will Chile establish technical and innovative leadership?  Is the only way they will attract talent by paying entrepreneurs to come to the country? Or will students and entrepreneurs come to Chile because it is one of the best places in the world for innovation in certain specific industries (pick your favorite – alternative energy? materials science? food science? cellulose outputs? video games and film? South American web commerce hub? automated mining? UAV’s? etc.)

Already there are multiple centers of excellence in the engineering schools in Santiago with strong entrepreneurial professors. Yet no dean, provost or government minister seems to want to issue a declarative sentence that says, “For the next five years we’re going to focus on building world-class leadership in these three areas.” (Perhaps because the cost of a public failure is so high in Chile. See below.)

I suggested that what seems to be missing is a stated goal for Chile to become a magnet for talent in specific domains. Why will people from South America stream to Chile, besides its magnificent geography?  In what fields will Chile’s universities and entrepreneurial culture create such an irresistible pull?

A Culture that does not accept failure
Chileans I met were concerned that their culture was not accepting of business and/or personal failure. This is not the land of second chances where failure means you are an experienced entrepreneur. Partially due to a lack of bankruptcy or commercial courts, the bankruptcy process in Chile is draconian. In discussions with accounting and financial professionals, I learned that getting caught up in it feels like a Dickens’s novel, it can take years to shut down a company.

In addition, in Chile the cost of personal failure is high. If you fail, you’ve failed your family, your community and your country. As a result, societal pressures favor people who avoid risky ventures. Because its entrepreneurs are unlikely to make commitments or definitive statements which they know might be risky, i.e. “we’re going to be a leader in our market” or “our startup will be $100 million in five years,” Chile can’t foster the “reality distortion field” that underlies a dynamic entrepreneurial culture.

I suggested that perhaps using a science analogy could help change Chilean perspectives about the risk and experimentation it takes to build new ventures. Entrepreneurship and incubators could be described as an “Innovation Laboratory”  – similar to a scientific laboratory where entrepreneurs develop and test hypothesis (iterative guesses) about new business models. And like science, starting a new venture is not a linear process but one that involves failures, dead ends and changes in direction.

Lessons From the Valley
At one of my presentations the audience was a mix of deans of multiple schools at Catholic University, government officials from the Ministry of the Economy, active entrepreneurs and students. I offered that Silicon Valley’s rise was serendipitous, that you can’t reverse engineer an accidental Entrepreneurial Cluster formed in the Cold War. However, we can point out the elements that made our valley successful, and point out the ones that may be helpful in Chile; the role of Universities and defense-driven university R&D, the rise of venture capital, a failure-tolerant culture and the emerging science of entrepreneurial education. Slides 22, 36, 97 and 117 are the key points.

Come To Chilecon Valley
If you’re serious about understanding centers of entrepreneurship outside the U.S., Chile is now one of the required stops. The progress in the last few years has been nothing short of outstanding.

I’ll be back.

Lessons Learned

  • Chile is trying to engineer an entrepreneurial cluster as a National policy
  • They’ve gotten off to a good start with a committed Ministry of the Economy
  • The universities are on board with passionate faculty and excited students
  • The country needs to build a deeper Venture Capital industry
  • Chilean core industries need to view entrepreneurship as an asset, and technological innovation as an opportunity to leap forward
  • Second chances are hard to come by in current Chilean business climate and culture

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Filed under: Teaching, Venture Capital | 36 Comments »

Happy Holidays

Posted on December 22, 2010 by steve blank

On Vacation until the New Year. Have have a happy holiday.

Penguin in Patagonia

 

Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Hubris, Passion and Customer Development

Posted on December 15, 2010 by steve blank

While I was teaching at Columbia in New York in November I was interviewed for the Shoshin Project by my friend Christian Jorg.

Filed under: Customer Development | 8 Comments »

Teaching Entrepreneurship in “Chilecon Valley”

Posted on December 13, 2010 by steve blank

Teaching in Chile
I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program.

Valaparaiso houses

Entrepreneurship and innovation in what I call “Chilecon Valley” is being talked about continually here.  In my next post I’ll share a longer description of my impressions.  But to give you a sense of how fast they are moving, it’s only been a week since I posted the syllabus for our new Stanford entrepreneurship class Engr245 (The Lean Launchpad.) This week the class has been adopted in the Computer Science department of the Catholic University of Chile. (Thanks to Professors Professor Felix Halcartegaray Vergara and Rosa Alarcon who will be teaching the class.)

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Halcartegaray (in English):

Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad
Next semester on the Department of Computer Science of the Catholic University of Chile professor Rosa Alarcón (@ruyalarcon) and I (@felixcl) will be teaching a course based on the Customer Development Model developed by Steve Blank. The objective of this course is that groups of students finish with a completed software product that has real customers and an identified market. The idea of this course started on a trip to Stanford University during March 2010, where we realized that many of the great innovations in Silicon Valley are born from Computer Science students, so we said “We should give our computer science students an opportunity to develop a company”. Then we saw the great alignment between the Customer Development Model and the Agile software development methodologies so we decided to create the course IIC3515 “Workshop of Entrepreneurship with Software” that applies both models to develop real software products with customers from the startup ideas of the students.

A few weeks ago, it was great to see that professor Steve Blank was developing a very similar course in Stanford called ”The Lean Launchpad” (Engr245) that combines the customer development model with agile development with the business model canvas, and therefore we convinced ourserlves that we where not so crazy with this course, or at least we are as crazy as they are. The syllabus for the Stanford course can be seen here. This course brings to life in a very interesting way the idea we had with professor Rosa Alarcón, and it starts on January 2011 so when Steve Blank was visiting Chile this week, we told him about our course,  and he offered all his help and experience to help us, and so we are very grateful to him. Therefore we will leverage the experience in Stanford giving the course on January and February to have a very interesting proposal to our students on March when we start. The syllabus for our course (in Spanish) is here: Programa de curso IIC3515. In this blog post I will add more information about the development of this course when I have it. We are very excited on this project, and we think it will have an important impact on our university and our students so thank you very much Steve for making this happen.

The goal of course IIC3515 is that students get together in teams (probably of 4) and develop their business idea during the semester, developing the software that represents it. Unlike other courses on entrepreneurship, this one is NOT about developing a Business Plan (in fact, the idea is that they write little and spend the time programming and getting out of the building to talk to customers.)  The students must develop their initial hypothesis of who their customers are and what is their products (using the Business Model Canvas) , and then get out to test this Hypothesis and pivot as they start knowing their customers and “getting smarter about them”.

With this methodology, once they finish the course they will have very important tools to continue developing their startup, and they will also have a product that they will feel confident about that there are customers that want to buy it, unlike what usually happens when the development of the product is completed and then you go out to the market to see if any customer wants it. In this case,  the customer will be considered since the first moment, and this results in a much more controlled market risk for the venture. The idea is also to have investors on the final stages of the course, and have mentors for the students that have real world experience in startups to support the students with their projects.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions! Any updates on this course in english will have the tag “Lean Launchpad course” to make it easier to search.

Here’s the course announcement in Spanish
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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.

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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 »

The VC Pitch – Confusing the Destination with the Journey

Posted on November 30, 2010 by steve blank

Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey.
Unknown

Entrepreneurs hear that VC pitches ought to be short, 10-20 slides.  What most don’t know is that there is no way they can deliver a presentation that short by just “writing” the slide deck.

You Got to be Kidding
An entrepreneur I’ve known for a long time came by the ranch over Thanksgiving break to show me the first pass of his new startup slide deck.

My eyes were glazed by slide 9. It was over 35 slides long, with each slide feeling like it had 12 lines of 10-point type. It had a problem statement going back to the invention of the telephone, an opportunity claiming to exceed the Gross National Product and it had every possible product feature with enough left over for three other startups products.

My first reaction was, “you got to be kidding.” Yet I was hearing the pitch from an experienced entrepreneur with multiple wins under his belt. He had raised money from name-brand VC’s in past startups and knew what a fundable VC slide deck looked like.  What was going on?

Then I remembered, every slide deck I ever wrote started out just like this.

The Slide Deck As A Brainstorming Tool
Most startups ideas are not built in an afternoon, typically they are the sum of seemingly disparate and discrete pieces of information, and a pattern recognition algorithm continuously running in a founders head.

What I was seeing was an entrepreneur using a slide deck as a way to collect his thoughts.  The slides were his brainstorming tool.  He was using them to think through the impact of the idea he had, and was trying on for size the potential opportunity and trying to use the slides to spec his features.

The difference between this entrepreneur and a novice was that he knew his presentation wasn’t ready to show to a VC; he was using it to share his thinking with me to get more feedback on his business model.

We talked about how much of his presentation were just hypotheses (most but not all,) what hypotheses he could quickly test outside the building (assumptions about minimum feature set, pricing and customer archetypes) and how to turn some of the hypotheses into facts.  I pointed him to my “Lessons Learned” slide decks that turn a standard VC pitch into something more informative.  He left with both of us knowing that he was months away (and lots of customer feedback) from being ready for a VC pitch.

Advice From People Who Get Bored Easy
Most of the advice founders get about Venture Capital slide decks are from the recipients of the presentations – the VC’s – letting you know how they want to see the final deck. And most of their recommendations are essentially “show us your business plan in PowerPoint.” Few VC’s have experienced the process a founder uses to get their idea into 10-slides. And none of them tell you how.

If you find yourself trying to shoehorn your 35-slide presentation into a “VC-ready” format, you don’t know enough yet. And you won’t know any more by sitting in your office surfing the web and writing more slides. Get out of the building and talk to potential users and customers. The irony is the more you know, the easier it is to make your presentation short and concise.

Lessons Learned

  • Long slide decks are indicative of you thinking out loud;
  • Get out of the building and get smarter.
  • The more you know (versus guess) the shorter the deck.
  • Most VC’s are looking for the “give us the business plan in PowerPoint”
  • Give them a “Lessons Learned” VC presentation.

Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

Filed under: Venture Capital | 12 Comments »

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars

Posted on November 24, 2010 by steve blank

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
Ralph Waldo Emerson

This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.

It may be that all the doomsayers are right.

But I don’t think so.

Let me offer my prediction. There’s a chance that the common wisdom is very, very wrong. That the second decade of the 21st century may turn out to be the West’s and in particular the United States’ finest hour.

I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. We’re standing at the beginning of the entrepreneurial revolution. This doesn’t mean just more technology stuff, though we’ll get that. This is a revolution that will permanently reshape business as we know it and more importantly, change the quality of life across the entire planet for all who come after us.

There’s Something Happening Here, What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear
The story to date is a familiar one. Over the last half a century, Silicon Valley has grown into the leading technology and innovation cluster for the United States and the world. Silicon Valley has amused us, connected (and separated us) as never before, made businesses more efficient and led to the wholesale transformation of entire industries (bookstores, video rentals, newspapers, etc.)

Wave after wave of hardware, software, biotech and cleantech products have emerged from what has become “ground zero” of entrepreneurial and startup culture. Silicon Valley emerged by the serendipitous intersection of:

  • Cold war research in microwaves and electronics at Stanford University,
  • a Stanford Dean of Engineering who encouraged startup culture over pure academic research,
  • Cold war military and intelligence funding driving microwave and military products for the defense industry in the 1950’s,
  • a single Bell Labs researcher deciding to start his semiconductor company next to Stanford in the 1950’s which led to
  • the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s,
  • the emergence of venture capital as a professional industry,
  • the personal computer revolution in 1980’s,
  • the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally
  • the wave of internet commerce applications in the first decade of the 21st century.

The pattern for the valley seemed to be clear. Each new wave of innovation was like punctuated equilibrium – just when you thought the wave had run its course into stasis, a sudden shift and radical change into a new family of technology emerged.

The Barriers to Entrepreneurship
While startups continued to innovate in each new wave of technology, the rate of innovation was constrained by limitations we only now can understand. Only in the last few years do we appreciate that startups in the past were constrained by:

  1. long technology development cycles (how long it takes from idea to product),
  2. the high cost of getting to first customers (how many dollars to build the product),
  3. the structure of the venture capital industry (a limited number of VC firms each needing to invest millions per startups),
  4. the expertise about how to build startups  (clustered in specific regions like Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, etc.),
  5. the failure rate of new ventures (startups had no formal rules and were a hit or miss proposition),
  6. the slow adoption rate of new technologies by the government and large companies.

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship
What’s happening is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that all the things that have been limits to startups and innovation are being removed.  At once.  Starting now.

Compressing the Product Development Cycle
In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.  The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.

Today startups have begun to build products differently.  Instead of building the maximum number of features, they look to deliver a minimum feature set in the shortest period of time.  This lets them deliver a first version of the product to customers in a fraction on the time.

For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years.

Startups Built For Thousands Rather than Millions of Dollars
Startups traditionally required millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product to customers. A company developing software would have to buy computers and license software from other companies and hire the staff to run and maintain it. A hardware startup had to spend money building prototypes and equipping a factory to manufacture the product.

Today open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. For consumer hardware, no startup has to build their own factory as the costs are absorbed by offshore manufacturers.

The cost of getting the first product out the door for an Internet commerce startup has dropped by a factor of a ten or more in the last decade.

The New Structure of the Venture Capital industry
The plummeting cost of getting a first product to market (particularly for Internet startups) has shaken up the venture capital industry. Venture capital used to be a tight club clustered around formal firms located in Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. While those firms are still there (and getting larger), the pool of money that invests risk capital in startups has expanded, and a new class of investors has emerged. New groups of VC’s, super angels, smaller than the traditional multi-hundred million dollar VC fund, can make small investments necessary to get a consumer internet startup launched. These angels make lots of early bets and double-down when early results appear. (And the results do appear years earlier then in a traditional startup.)

In addition to super angels, incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and the 100+ plus others worldwide like them have begun to formalize seed-investing. They pay expenses in a formal 3-month program while a startup builds something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale.

Finally, venture capital and angel investing is no longer a U.S. or Euro-centric phenomenon. Risk capital has emerged in China, India and other countries where risk taking, innovation and liquidity is encouraged, on a scale previously only seen in the U.S.

The emergence of incubators and super angels have dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. The globalization of entrepreneurship means the worldwide pool of potential startups has increased at least ten fold since the turn of this century.

Entrepreneurship as Its Own Management Science
Over the last ten years, entrepreneurs began to understand that startups were not simply smaller versions of large companies. While companies execute business models, startups search for a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable businessmodel.)

Instead of adopting the management techniques of large companies, which too often stifle innovation in a young start up, entrepreneurs began to develop their own management tools. Using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack, entrepreneurs first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test these hypotheses with customers outside in the field (customer development) and 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 change the business model.

The result, startups now have tools that speed up the search for customers, reduce time to market and slash the cost of development.

Consumer Internet Driving Innovation
In the 1950’s and ‘60’s U.S. Defense and Intelligence organizations drove the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley by providing research and development dollars to universities, and purchased weapons systems that used the valley’s first microwave and semiconductor components. In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, momentum shifted to the enterprise as large businesses supported innovation in PC’s, communications hardware and enterprise software. Government and the enterprise are now followers rather than leaders. Today, it’s the consumer – specifically consumer Internet companies – that are the drivers of innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions users can happen in years versus decades.

The Entrepreneurial Singularity
The barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. In each case they’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten. For example, Internet commerce startups the time needed to get the first product to market has been cut by a factor of ten, the dollars needed to get the first product to market cut by a factor of ten, the number of sources of initial capital for entrepreneurs has increased by a factor of ten, etc.

And while innovation is moving at Internet speed, this won’t be limited to just internet commerce startups. It will spread to the enterprise and ultimately every other business segment.

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
The economic downturn in the United States has had an unexpected consequence for startups – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company.  They have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain.

If we are at the cusp of a revolution as important as the scientific and industrial revolutions what does it mean? Revolutions are not obvious when they happen. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.”  When Karl Benz drove around Mannheim in 1885, no one said, “There will be 500 million of these driving around in a century.” And certainly in 1958 when Noyce and Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the idea of a quintillion (10 to the 18th) transistors being produced each year seemed ludicrous.

Yet it’s possible that we’ll look back to this decade as the beginning of our own revolution. We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. As the time when we reinvented the American economy and our Gross Domestic Product began to take off and the U.S. and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before.  It may be the dawn of a new era for a new American economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

One that our children will look back on and marvel that when it was the darkest, we saw the stars.

Happy Thanksgiving.
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Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 80 Comments »

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