Lean Startup

Across industries, the ability to grow your business without overinvesting resources is of utmost importance. Nonprofits face a unique challenge in being forced to run a lean ship without the safety net of VC money. The Sama team has turned constraints in resources into lessons on being mindful in how they run and build their business. Wendy Gonzalez, SVP & Managing Director of Samasource, explains how to apply nonprofit tactics to ensure the long-term success of your company, regardless of your funding source or the type of business you run.

Looking to save your team countless hours and dollars? To get unstuck? Learn how the design sprint can give you a superpower: the ability to build and test nearly any idea in just 40 hours. The sprint—a five-day process for answering critical business questions through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas—is a “greatest hits” of battle-tested business processes any team can use. Sharing this shortcut to learning and innovation is Jake Knapp, creator of Google Ventures’ sprint process, co-creator of Google Hangouts, and author of The New York Times bestseller Sprint.

As Tren Griffin will explain, the entrepreneurs founding startups with the biggest impact are missionaries who are laser focused on implementing the insight at the core of their business. Mercenaries are driven by monetary rewards and fame. Mercenaries seldom have the necessary desire to change the world, a desire that would otherwise enable them to persevere through hardship and create a world-changing business.

Matthew Brimer is a social entrepreneur, community builder, and general mischief instigator with a penchant for turning experiments into businesses and art projects into global movements. He’ll share his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned from building GoCrossCampus, General Assembly, the global Daybreaker dance party series, and beyond.

The years you spend creating a startup is often time filled with regret, joy, pain and — hopefully someday—success. In this presentation, Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz, will talk about how his company, which started as a personal blog while he was deeply in debt, evolved into a $40m+ revenue/year software business. Rand won’t pull punches or hide the truth. Instead he’ll offer an unvarnished, transparent look inside the hardest and rarely-talked-about aspects of building a company.

Melinda Jacobs, co-founder of Lucent Sky, gathers sales and product feedback from customers on three continents. She’ll describe the impact cultural customs and norms have on how feedback and customer development take place, with a focus on how to adapt Lean methodologies into diverse cultural settings.

“I feel great when I’m treated badly,” said no one ever. People are the nucleus of any successful business. Breather Co-Founder and CCO, Caterina Rizzi, talks about why your business is nothing without the people who use your product and why treating them like it’s their birthday is the secret sauce to a strong, relatable and memorable experience. At Breather, they’ve built empathy, humility and service into their core brand values and have found that the more you give, the more you get.

Design Thinking–with its focus on user outcomes, constant reinvention and empowered teams–has revitalized product development at IBM. In this Ignite Talk, you’ll see how IBM Design Thinking fueled the creation of a breakthrough new collaboration product giving IBM Watson intelligence to everyday professionals.

IBM is on a mission to create a sustainable culture of design and to bring a human-centered focus to its thousands of products and services. Since 2013, the company has hired over 1,100 designers to work alongside engineers and business leaders across the company. In this multidisciplinary setting, how does the Lean Startup approach interplay with design thinking? How can teams bridge the gap between user experience insights and real business opportunities? Phil Gilbert, General Manager of IBM Design, will discuss how IBM’s approach to continuous innovation at a global scale is transforming the way the company works.

Jason Fried, co-founder & CEO of Basecamp, joins us to talk about leading business teams in a way that supports the Lean Startup practice – collaborative, productive, efficient.