I can always tell when one of my students has been in the military. They’re focused, they’re world-wise past their years, and they don’t break a sweat in the fast pace and chaotic nature of the class and entrepreneurship. Todd Branchflower took my Lean LaunchPad class having been entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him … Continue reading »
teaching
Modern great books: David S. Landes’s “The Unbound Prometheus” and nineteen others…
The most important economic historian ever to teach at U.C. Berkeley died last month: my old teacher David S. Landes taught at Berkeley starting in 1958 until Harvard lured him away until 1964. From a student’s perspective, he was ideal: he knew more than you did, was eager to share, could and did make everything … Continue reading »
Why real learning is outside the building, not demo day
Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is … Continue reading »
Reinventing life science startups – evidence-based entrepreneurship
What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? We’re going to test this hypothesis by 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 … Continue reading »
Reinventing life science startups – medical devices and digital health
What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? We’re going to test this hypothesis by teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Healthcare (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. In this three … Continue reading »
The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come — Victor Hugo The Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship curriculum has caught fire. This week 100 educators from around the world will come to Stanford to learn how to teach it. —– Life is full of unintended consequences. Ten years ago I started thinking about why … Continue reading »
Who’s doing the learning?
In a startup, instead of paying consultants to tell you what they learned, you want to pay them to teach you how to learn. Roominate, one of my favorite Lean LaunchPad teams, came out to the ranch last week for a strategy session. Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun … Continue reading »
Crazy enough to change the world
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow … Continue reading »
Entrepreneurs Experience — do it and learn it
In 2012, in partnership with Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley and NCIIA, Jerry Engel and I first offered the Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. In addition the class offers a suggested “Lean Entrepreneurship” curriculum and the details … Continue reading »
Qualcomm’s corporate entrepreneurship program — lessons learned (part 2)
I ran into Ricardo Dos Santos and his amazing Qualcomm Venture Fest a few years ago and was astonished with its breath and depth. From that day on, when I got asked about which corporate innovation program had the best process for idea selection, I started my list with Qualcomm. This is part 2 of … Continue reading »
Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora!
My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. He’s back to Bogota, Colombia this week for round two. —– Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora! Lean LaunchPad Colombia starts again today in Bogota with 25 more … Continue reading »
Don’t underestimate the undergraduates
Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. Jim has founded six companies, including Preview Travel, one of the first online travel agencies, which went public in 1997 and subsequently merged to createTravelocity.com as an independent company. Today he is the co-founder and Chairman of Triporati, LaunchPad Central. And Zignal Labs. Jim co-taught classes with … Continue reading »
The endless frontier: U.S. science and national industrial policy (part 1)
The U.S. has spent the last 70 years making massive investments in basic and applied research. Government funding of research started in World War II driven by the needs of the military for weapon systems to defeat Germany and Japan. Post WWII the responsibility for investing in research split between agencies focused on weapons development and space exploration … Continue reading »
Open-source entrepreneurship
One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. Free: Startup … Continue reading »
Customer development in Japan: A history lesson
The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer … Continue reading »
10,000 startups — Startup Weekend Next
Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched – Startup Weekend Next. A partnership of Startup Weekend, Startup America, TechStars and Udacity, Startup Weekend Next brings four weeks of amazing hands-on training learning to build your startup to cities around the world. Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The Lean LaunchPad Class You may … Continue reading »
Startup communities: Building regional clusters
How to build regional entrepreneurial communities has just gotten it’s first “here’s how to do it” book. Brad Feld’s new book Startup Communities joins the two other “must reads,” (Regional Advantage and Startup Nation) and one “must view” (The Secret History of Silicon Valley) for anyone trying to understand the components of a regional cluster. There’s probably no one more qualified … Continue reading »
Why innovation dies
Faced with disruptive innovation, you can be sure any possibility for innovation dies when a company forms a committee for an “overarching strategy.” — I was reminded how innovation dies when the email below arrived in my inbox. It was well written, thoughtful and had a clearly articulated sense of purpose. You may have seen … Continue reading »
Why would anyone claim UC doesn’t teach American history?
Back at the beginning of April, when Rick Santorum was still a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he made a shocking claim about teaching in the University of California system: “seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course,” Santorum said. “It’s not even available to be … Continue reading »
Blinded by the light — The epiphany
“Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun /iˈpifənē/ : A moment of sudden revelation or insight.” We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. It all just … Continue reading »