Lean Startup

Our Lean Startup Conference is just a few weeks away, and this week we were lucky enough to host a conversation with one of our keynote speakers, Noam Wasserman, author of the bestselling book The Founder’s Dilemmas, and the author of the new book Life Is a Startup.

Noam spoke with Lean Startup Co. Faculty Member, Elliot Susel, about the overlap in founder and life lessons and the importance of proactively tackling those issues in our business and personal lives.

In Elliot and Noam’s conversation, they discuss:

- Why focusing on people decisions is just as important as product.

- Key business lessons we can learn from founders and how we can apply those same lessons to our personal lives.

- The importance of doing research well.

And much, much more…

It was still early in his career when Noam Wasserman recognized the importance of focusing on the people around you. He was just starting out as an engineer when he noticed a pattern. “If we focused on anyone besides ourselves….it was the customers, and a key thing is we then neglected to think about the team we’re building with.”

Around the same time, Noam came across an article about venture capitalists by Bill Solomon. In the article, Bill found that 65% of startups that failed did so not because of product issues, but because of people problems and tensions between founders.

The importance of that statistic stuck with him. In his own experiences as a founder, Noam realized the significance of understanding the people part of the business. Because when it comes to startups, people are just as important as product. In his shift to academia, Noam continued the pursuit of understanding the key areas where founders make fateful decisions — including people decisions — and how they can make better decisions to increase their chances of success.

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We recently hosted a webcast conversation between Sonali Shetty, Entrepreneur & Founder of Kova Digital and Elliot Susel, Faculty Member at Lean Startup Co., focused on innovation and why it’s so important to speak to your customers early and often.

In Elliot and Sonali’s conversation, they discuss:

- The three major types of innovation.

- The importance of making it someone’s job in your company to work on innovation.

- Why it’s important to speak to your customers early and often to learn about what they want and need.

And much, much more…

About ten years ago, Sonali Shetty recognized an approaching shift in the way companies could interact with their customers. Apple had just opened the app store, social media was on the rise, and Facebook had opened up their API to third party app developers. All of a sudden, companies could now directly communicate with their customers and client base. It was a new frontier.

“I wanted to...educate [startups and corporations] on what this change meant for them and how they needed to prepare for it,” Shetty says. So Kova Digital was launched. At the time, they were a third-party app developer on Facebook. But the digital world took off quickly, and very soon the landscape evolved. Products weren’t just limited to apps, but mobile, web, and IoT came along, as well as algorithms and machine learning. But all this didn’t change Shetty’s focus, it just expanded the ways in which Kova Digital could help their customer base.

Shetty likes using the Deng Xioping analogy of crossing a river by feeling the stones. Your goal of crossing the river remains your focus, but you’re feeling your way as you go, stepping on the stones that provide the most solid footing and make the most sense. “We always wanted to be a product innovation company, but we pivoted and modified in the best Lean Startup tradition in terms of what that means,” she says.

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We recently hosted a webcast conversation between Matt Candler, Founder & CEO of 4.0 Schools, and Marilyn Gorman, Faculty Lead at Lean Startup Co., about how lean principles are being used in education.

In Marilyn and Matt’s conversation, they discuss:

- How early assumptions about what your customers want can hurt your credibility and waste time.

- Why it’s important to know the problem you are trying to solve, and then having the courage to experiment in a small way.

- The importance of building something for a customer segment rather than a one-size-fits all product for everyone.

And much, much more...

Seven years ago, 4.0 Schools founder and CEO Matt Candler set out to change the future of schooling. As a lifelong educator, he recognized that innovations in education were few and far between and that the people who were best able to come up with new, groundbreaking ways to reach and teach the students, parents, and members of our communities, were the educators themselves. So 4.0 Schools was created and launched in order to fund and guide educational entrepreneurs and help them launch new charter public schools in the south east.

Unfortunately, their efforts didn’t churn out the changes in the system they were hoping to see. “Many of those schools when they first were created were not very different,” says Matt, “they were evolutionary or iterative at best.”

But around the same time, a few of Matt’s colleagues asked if they could run an experiment on the side. They wanted to work with teachers in New Orleans (where 4.0 Schools is based) who weren’t ready to quit teaching or launch a new school, but still wanted to try something new.

What Matt and his colleagues discovered was a gap between the people who have innovative ideas about the future of school and their ability to do anything about it. So in just the second year of their organization, 4.0 Schools completely changed focus from expensive, year-long fellowships for educational entrepreneurs, to helping craft pilot programs for educators who want to make a difference.

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We recently hosted a conversation between Mikael Cho, Co-Founder & CEO of Unsplash, and Elliot Susel, Faculty Member at Lean Startup Co., about how Unsplash put community at the center of their product.

In Elliot and Mikael’s conversation, they discuss:

- How starting with something small and high quality can lead to something much bigger.

- How to encourage your community to participate in your product design.

- Why it’s important to make “being useful” your first priority instead of making money.

- The importance of trusting your intuition but also seeking feedback.

- And much, much more...

Co-Founder & CEO of the photo-sharing startup, Unsplash, Mikael Cho, spoke with Lean Startup Co. faculty member, Elliot Susel, about how a simple problem with photo access filled the needs of a community of photo lovers.

The most successful startups often tap into an unfulfilled need that nobody has gotten around to filling. Unsplash did just that in the photography space. Mikael, who comes from the design industry, saw a problem that needed solving before he ever planned to start a company from the solution. When building the website for his design business, Crew, Mikael quickly realized that finding good photos that didn’t cost a lot of money was “a really crappy process.”

He wanted a way to remove the licenses from photos so users could have access to high quality photos without paying a lot or jumping through hoops. The easiest solution was just to take them, themselves. They hired a photographer.

Left with a bunch of unused photos after the shoot, Mikael wanted to use them to create a photo-finding experience that would be the opposite of his own bad one. “We made the ideal experience for someone who wanted to use photos, and we could use our own,” he said.

With a $9 domain name for Unsplash and a Tumblr theme for $19, they threw up a simple website in three hours with one goal: to upload ten new photos every ten days for anyone who wanted to use them. From there they used public Dropbox links hooked up to a MailChimp newsletter and a Google Docs sign up form.

Their website was so simple Mikael says they were actually embarrassed by it and didn’t plan to share it too widely. The only bit of advertising they did was to post a link to Unsplash on Hacker News, a site where they’d never had much success, so if it flopped, it would be no big deal. Instead, what followed, Mikael calls a “happy accident”: tens of thousands of people signed up on their Google Doc and began accessing the photos.

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https://leanstartup.co/education

We recently hosted the second episode on a mini-series we’re doing with Rhapsody Venture Partners on Lean Startup in the hard sciences where we spoke with Jason Whaley, General Partner at Rhapsody and Jeff Uhrig, CEO of Sirrus.

Rhapsody is a venture capital firm that specializes in startups in the hard sciences, and Sirrus is a Cincinnati-based developer of novel chemicals that will reduce the time, energy requirements and environmental footprint of many manufacturing processes.

They spoke with Lean Startup Co. faculty member, Hisham Ibrahim about how they were able to take smart steps to successfully build - and sell - Sirrus in just five years and how believing in themselves is an important part of the process.

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https://leanstartup.co/education

We recently hosted a conversation between Jensen and Elliot focused on taking the leap from a big company to launching a start-up and the differences between those two company cultures.

In 2014, Jensen Harris had a conversation with Kieran Snyder about their mutual dissatisfaction with writing software. “Here we are, 40 years into the post typewriter era, and still, all the software [we have] to write [does] the same thing a typewriter did,” he says. So, sixteen years into his career at Microsoft, Jensen Harris decided it was time to set out and try something new: launch his own startup. “Although I loved much of what I was doing...I felt like it was time to make a change,” he says.

So Jensen and Kieran decided to go for it. They quit their big corporate jobs and set out to raise seed money for Textio - augmented writing software that uncovers meaningful patterns in language to help you know how your words are going to work and guides you to stronger communication in your writing. “It’s the biggest advance in writing since the computer,” Jensen says.

Now three and a half years into their venture, Textio co-founder and CTO Jensen Harris spoke with Lean Startup Co. faculty member Elliot Susel in a recent webcast about the differences between working for big companies and startups and taking chances to further your career.

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Gone are the days when Lean Startup was used only by two guys in a garage. The methods have gone mainstream and are being practiced in industries across the globe. To date, our Lean Startup Co. Education Program Faculty have coached more than 30 teams from intelligence agencies including the NSA and NGA.

In this webcast, hear from Erin Bugg of the NSA, their Lean Startup Co. coach Marilyn Gorman, and Co-Founder of Lean Startup Co., Heather McGough, who discuss the transformation of the Agency culture around the pillar of innovation. Topics include: getting stakeholder buy-in and challenges in facing bureaucracy, making decisions at speed underpinned by data, delivering value to customers, translating the method across disciplines, and more.

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Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup

Follow Department of Defense @DeptofDefense

Heather McGough can be reached on Twitter @UrbanitySF

www.leanstartup.co/education

Lean Startup Week 2016 Highlights by Lean Startup

We all want to make product decisions backed by good data. But you can’t just A/B test your way to success: Whether you’re just incubating a new project and starting from zero, or you’re spinning wheels feeling mired in too much noise, learn how to leverage empathetic design to find and focus on needs your customers care about – and build exceptional products. Tom Nguyen, Principal at Adobe and co-creator of Adobe Spark, shares real-world examples and actionable best practices to help you apply constraints, powerful stories, and a growth mindset to align your team and spark success for your organization.

Michael Perry, founder of the innovative virtual employee Kit, grew his business from a small team housed in a 200-sq ft space (in the back of a law firm) to a company acquired by Shopify. He leads a dynamic presentation about what it’s been like on both sides of the table.