One can make the case that the New York venture capital industry is rooted in the 21st century, not the 20th.
— Steve Blank
Skunk works were emblematic of corporate structures that focused on execution and devalued innovation.
The Lockheed Skunk Works, led by Kelly Johnson, was responsible for its Advanced Development Projects - everything from the P-80, the first U.S. jet fighter plane, to the U-2 and A-12 spy planes.
By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools.
On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.
Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process.
The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.
Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.
Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry.
Value Proposition Design is a 'must have' for anyone creating a new venture. It captures the core issues around understanding and finding customer problems and designing and validating potential solutions.
I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.
Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses.
Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen?
As an entrepreneur, my problem was that I had too many ideas.
In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA.
Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.
Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.
Michael Bloomberg has yet to get his due for engineering the New York entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.
Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself.
Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.
Only by moving away from the comforts of your conference room to truly engage with and listen to your customers can you learn in depth about their problems, produce features to solve those problems, and learn what drives customers to recommend, approve, and purchase products.
Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.
Each industry in a region should develop a playbook that expands and details the strategy and tactics of how to build a scalable startup.
There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.
The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.
In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction.
We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan.
With clear definitions and a taxonomy that illustrates their relationships, the Inventure Cycle defines the pathway from inspiration to implementation. This framework captures the skills, attitudes, and actions that are necessary to foster innovation and to bring breakthrough ideas to the world.
The Lean Startup is a process for turning ideas into commercial ventures. Its premise is that startups begin with a series of untested hypotheses. They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers.
A startup is not just about the idea: it's about testing and then implementing the idea. A founding team without these skills is likely dead on arrival.
Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market.
The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university.
Skunk works differed from advanced research groups in that they were more than just product development groups. They had direct interaction with customers and controlled a sales channel which allowed them to negotiate their own deals with customers.
While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.
Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.
First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.
Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.
What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.
The Value Proposition Canvas functions like a plug-in to the Business Model Canvas and zooms into the value proposition and customer segment to describe the interactions between customers and product more explicitly and in more detail.
Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership, technological vision, frugality, and the desire to succeed.
Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship - the equivalent of 'how to run a lemonade stand.'
Describing something as the 'Woodstock of...' has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering.
My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way.
Everyone on the founding team ought to invest the time in a coding bootcamp.
Market type determines the startup's customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending. It changes customer needs, adoption rates, product features, and positioning as well as its launch strategies, channels and activities.
When your product solves a problem that costs customers sleep, revenue, or profits, things are definitely looking up.
