With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes) makes Kauffman the dominant player in the entrepreneurship space. Kauffman launched Founders School – a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups … Continue reading »
startups
Is This Startup Ready for Investment?
Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. However, accelerator Demo Days are a combination of graduation ceremony and pitch contest, with the uncomfortable feel of a swimsuit competition. Other than “I’ll know it when I see it”, there’s no formal way for an investor attending Demo … Continue reading »
How to be Smarter than Your Investors — Continuous Customer Discovery
Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. — Awhile back I blogged about Ashwin, one of my ex-students wanted to raise a seed round to build Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a Hyper-spectral camera and fly it over farm fields collecting hyper-spectral images. These images, when … Continue reading »
What I Learned by Flipping the MOOC
Two of the hot topics in education in the last few years have been Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and the flipped classroom. I’ve been experimenting with both of them. What I’ve learned (besides being able to use the word “pedagogy” in a sentence) is 1) assigning students lectures as homework doesn’t guarantee the students will … Continue reading »
Sometimes it Pays to Be a Jerk
That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made William Shakespeare Henry V | Act 4, Scene 3 The concepts in my Lean LaunchPad curriculum can be taught in a variety of classes–as an introduction to entrepreneurship all the way to a graduate level “capstone class.” I recently learned being tough … Continue reading »
Time for Founders School
Having a film crew in your living room for two days is something you want to put on your bucket list. With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes) makes Kauffman the dominant player in the entrepreneurship space. … Continue reading »
Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster — Part 3 of Bigger in Bend
Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. I visited Bend last year and caught up with his progress. Today with every city, state, country … Continue reading »
Early-stage Regional Venture Funds–Part 2 of 3 of Bigger in Bend
Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. I visited Bend last year and caught up with his progress. Today with every city, state and … Continue reading »
Bigger in Bend – Building a Regional Startup Cluster, Part 1 of 3
When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. … Continue reading »
Do Pivots Matter?
There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure ’ Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven In late 2013 Cowboy Ventures did an analysis of U.S.-based tech companies started in the last 10 years, now valued at $1 billion. They found 39 of these companies. They called them the “Unicorn Club.” … Continue reading »
Lessons Learned in Medical Devices
This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. The class had 1,145 engagements with instructors … Continue reading »
Lessons learned in digital health
This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Part 1: issues in the therapeutics drug discovery pipeline Part 2: medical devices and digital health Part 3: described what we’re going to do about it. Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical … Continue reading »
We’ve seen the future of translational medicine and it’s disruptive
A team of 110 researchers and clinicians, in therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health in 25 teams at UCSF, has just shown us the future of translational medicine. It’s Lean, it’s fast, it works and it’s unlike anything else ever done. It’s going to get research from the lab to the bedside cheaper and faster. Welcome … Continue reading »
How Do You Want to Spend the Next 4 Years of Your Life?
As our Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences class winds down, a good number of the 26 teams are trying to figure out whether they should go forward to turn their class project into a business. Given that we’ve been emphasizing Evidence-based entrepreneurship and the Investment Readiness Level, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when someone asked, “After … Continue reading »
It’s time to play Moneyball: The investment readinesslevel
Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. We think we can do better. We now have the tools, technology and data to take incubators and accelerators to the next level. Teams can … Continue reading »
Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences – Revenue Streams
We’re teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 2,056 customers to date. Part 1: issues in the therapeutics drug discovery pipeline Part 2: medical devices and digital health Part 3: described what we’re going to … Continue reading »
Well, they ‘should’ be our customers
When scientists and engineers who’ve been working in the lab for years try to commercialize their technology, they often get trapped by their own beliefs – including who the customers are, what features are important, pricing etc. One the key tenets of the Lean LaunchPad class is that every week each team gets out of … Continue reading »
A New Way to Look at Competitors
Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. The slide is a holdover from when existing companies launched products into crowded markets. Most of the time this graph is inappropriate for startups or existing companies creating new markets. Here’s … Continue reading »
300 Teams in 2 Years
This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we’ve crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program. I-Corps is the accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial … Continue reading »
This will save us years — Lean LaunchPad for Life Science
We’re deep into week 2 of teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. Part 1 of this post described the issues in the drug discovery. Part 2 covered medical devices and digital health. Part 3 described what we’re going … Continue reading »