Завзятість – Tenacity: How I Spent A Year One Night in Kiev

Posted on December 26, 2012 by steveblank

This July I thought I had set the record for tenacity in my age group. Go ahead and take a moment to read the post, it’s short. I reminded my Startup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf this is how entrepreneurs played the game, blah, blah, blah.

As usual Bob did one better. Here’s a guest post on what happened to him in the Ukraine.

—–

Usually when you teach entrepreneurship, one of the key things you teach is tenacity, a vital characteristic of great entrepreneurs.  Only rarely does the teaching itself require tenacity, as it did late last month in Kiev, Ukraine.

Following two days with a dozen startups at a brand-new incubator in Kiev called “Happy Farm,” it was time to head to my next stop: Skolkovo, the private Moscow business school formed to bring Silicon Valley-quality training to young Russian entrepreneurs.  I was headed to my second Lean LaunchPad launch, excited that the first one in June had led to four funded startups raising some $2-million from Russian VC’s.

Ukraine was magnificent. Kiev is a beautiful city and Happy Farm Training Director Elena Kalibaba led me on a walking tour. Then it was on to a series of workshops and one-on-one coaching sessions with ten terrific startup teams, plus a press conference with Forbes Ukraine and others. When it was over, Happy Farm CEO and founder (and serial entrepreneur) Anna Degtereva drove me to the airport and–for some strange reason–escorted me to the gate.

I Spent A Year One Night in Kiev
As I approached the check-in desk, a very gruff Ukrainian customs official looked at my visa to Russia and said, “You cannot travel.  Your visa to Russia has already been used.  No exceptions.” He said nothing else in English, and waved me out of the line.

A mad scramble uncovered the problem:  when I had changed planes for Kiev back in Moscow they stamped my visa as “entered” so that counted as “visiting” Russia. As far as Ukrainian customs was concerned I didn’t have a valid visa to enter Russia therefore I couldn’t get on my plane. No charm or magic worked at all with airport customs, and we were told in no uncertain terms that Bob Dorf would be living in Kiev for two weeks, absent miracles that seldom happen in government bureaucracies, at home or in Ukraine, for sure.

The problem was that I had 25 founders from all over the Russian republics expecting me to teach a Lean LaunchPad class 12 hours later in Moscow. And then I was heading to Paris and Bogota to teach as well.  Oops. Not if I had to spend two weeks in the Ukraine applying for a new Russian visa!

We dashed off from the Kiev airport to the Russian consulate in hopes of sorting it out in two hours rather than two weeks. While on the way, we called the embassy at 12:55 and found out that the Embassy closes at 13:00 on Fridays, and we were 30 minutes away. And I don’t even like borscht, a prime Ukrainian delicacy, nor did I know how the “Bob Dorf world tour” would continue.

Four entrepreneurs in a car
Was this time to give up?  Of course not. Four entrepreneurs in a car in Kiev means three cell phones buzzing in different directions in Russian and me as the non Russian-speaker on my iPad looking at travel sites for the next flight, just in case I could get a visa. We went to the consulate anyway, where two armed guards right out of your favorite spy movie (fat, grumpy, unshaven and did I say grumpy?) barred the door. After rapid-fire begging in Russian, a phone finally call got a functionary out to basically shoo us away. “Visa processing takes two weeks, and that would start Monday, since the visa office is now closed. The Professor can go home to America, but can not go from here to Russia.” Visions of stealth border crossings or—perhaps even worse—a ten-hour Skype talk with my Moscow students—played over and over again.Cossack Attack

While the thoughts of going back to the U.S. for a weekend at home with my long-lost wife Fran were lovely, the thought of disappointing 25 students the next day and 50 more two days later in Bogota weren’t fun. I immensely enjoyed my last lectures at Skolkovo and was eager to do it again. 

So we started an international incident of sorts
First, the truly entrepreneurial and unstoppable Happy Farmer, Anna, somehow in five phone calls got through to the Foreign Minister of Ukraine, told him the story, begged for his help. She did this through a friend (how everything happens in Ukraine, of course) who served as one of his deputies. “I will talk to him at four pm and he will call the Russians,” she said, which offered only nominal relief: the last flight out was at 7 pm, and there was no firm commitment that anything good would happen.

At the same time, on the Russian side of the border, Skolkovo’s equally tenacious Startups Project Director, Lawrence Wright, went to work, calling the Russian foreign office and imploring them to call the Ukrainian embassy and tell them “let Dorf out.” When they agreed to consider breaking every rule in the 40-pound Russian rulebook, the fun began.

The Ukrainian solution to all this, while we paced for two hours to see if anybody heard our cries: “lets go to lunch and have a drink.” In perhaps one of four times in my entire life, I was actually unable to eat. The thought of jumping barbed wire fences, pursued by Cossacks, was quickly looming as my only choice for an on-time performance launching the LaunchPad.  Meanwhile, something clicked. Somebody got to somebody, and suddenly the Russian Consul himself, boss of the entire place, headed back to—or was sent back to–the office himself to personally produce a visa for Bob Dorf in one hour, not two weeks.

We were given less than an hour to find wifi and download the 20-page visa application in the backseat of an SUV.  Needed to have the original, not a copy, of the new Skolkovo “invitation letter” physically in my hand. Scrambled to get a passport photo and a printer to print out the application. Done, back to the Consulate at Indy 500 speed!

Somehow it worked. If Anna and her team are as good at running over hot coals and through brick walls with their startups as they were with my visa, watch for lots of great companies emerging from the Happy Farm.  As for me, I was sure I was headed to the funny farm.  By nine I was heading to Moscow. Six hours of fun aggravation, five and a half of which had me absolutely sure we were opening a branch of K&S Ranch in Kiev.

But the best part of the adventure is that I now had a better tenacity story than Steve.  Beat this one!

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 9 Comments »

Developing a 21st Century Entrepreneurship Curriculum

Posted on December 14, 2012 by steveblank

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 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 of how to teach the capstone Lean LaunchPad class.

Sidnee Peck from Arizona State University’s Carey School of Business attended the last Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. At ASU Sidnee is the Director of Entrepreneurial Initiatives, and the co-facilitator for the Venture Catalyst’s Rapid Startup School. Sidnee taught her own Lean LaunchPad class a week after returning to ASU, (holding some sort of record for a curriculum Pivot.) I asked her to share what she learned in the class and what she learned when she put it to practice.  Here’s what she had to say…

—–

As an entrepreneurship educator, I have two goals:

Sidnee Peck

  • inspire and encourage students to spark energy around entrepreneurship and their dreams,
  • make the reality of entrepreneurship clear enough to prevent students from wasting time on a life decision that is not right for them.

I believe this is best done through experiential learning where students spend most of their time “doing.” I have spent my entire time at Arizona State University trying to find the most effective tools and methods for teaching entrepreneurship to my students in order to achieve these goals. I update my course frequently in an effort to create the optimal learning environment and before the Lean LaunchPad training course I was still searching for the perfect action-oriented learning model.

The Lean LaunchPad Educators course
I truly did not know what to expect when I arrived for the LLP educators course.  I had been referred by a colleague in the University’s incubator and did some preliminary reading as the trip approached but wasn’t familiar with the concepts of business models or customer development.

I was blown away by what I actually learn and take away from this experience – it has changed the way I teach and the way I view my time in the classroom.  It has also impacted my students’ lives in a significant way.

The biggest surprise I encountered may seem simple, but significantly changed the way I viewed the process.  Coming into the course I had been teaching the class on the basis of execution; teaching my students that they needed to be actively setting goals supported by tasks and executing on them.  My philosophy was sound (and was supported by many bright people): nothing happens on paper or in the classroom, it all happens outside via real action and interaction.

But on the first day, Steve framed it in a different way: execution of a business plan doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter because executing on a business plan that has not been validated is a waste of time and energy.  Instead, we should first focus on searching for the best business model and validating our assumptions.  After we prove that the model works, then, and only then, execute on it and build a business.

I may have been the only person at the conference who was learning the methodology for the first time and would be applying it upon my return to ASU within the coming week in my fall class.  This was bold…but it was a “why wait?” mentality, and I am SO thankful that I went for it.  Luckily, I had interviewed students for the course (as I had designed it before coming to the conference) during enrollment months (before I knew I would even teach this methodology) because I knew I wanted only the most passionate and committed students and I would do my best to hold them accountable to executing on their ideas.  It took time and preparation to roll this out so quickly, but the materials I received at the conference made it possible.  I had a roadmap in front of me, and I just had to be prepared to deliver it.

Sidnee Peck ASU ClassOne of the biggest (and best) surprises from actually teaching the class is the way that students bounce back from the direct and sometimes tough live feedback.  I had a major fear that we would scare students right out of the class, but after the first two weeks, they expressed how much they appreciated it, one student tell me that this was his favorite class because he had learned so much in just two weeks.  This realization made the rest of the semester easier, knowing that the feedback that is sometimes hard to give and take is the most important, and is valued by the students.  We established an environment of trust and a place where we were comfortable being uncomfortable.

What I wish I knew going into the semester is that the interview process and student selection is incredibly impactful on the success of the class.  In an effort to be inclusive, I allowed any student who had a business he/she wanted to launch enroll.  Going forward, I will be much more particular based on each student’s readiness.  I did get quite lucky, however, as the majority of my students are a good fit and truly want to work on their business models.  Some, however, are not ready.  They need to mature a bit before the LLP process will hit home with them and I should defer these students to a later year.

In the future I will also train my mentors in a more significant way.  I had an incredible pool of experienced entrepreneurs and business people to choose from – but without fully understanding the customer development process, some were steering my students way off track (asking for business plans!) and I had to pull them back when we met in class.

I also wish I could have recruited more in-class advisors to give live feedback…this was challenging because of my timeline, and while I did get a fair number to visit, more would have been welcomed.  There is an art to giving the right type of feedback in the right manner at the right time.  It takes practice, and the more experts we have in the room, the more powerful it can be.

The best part about the whole thing is, of course, the results my students have experienced from giving the process the attention it deserves.  I was blown away by how hard undergrads would work for their business idea.  I was impressed EVERY week by the outside work that was done and the number of interviews performed.  There were incredible learning points every single week and over the course of the semester multiple businesses made first sales, gained new customers, launched, and one even got hired by a competitor to roll his product into a product line through a proprietary manufacturing process.  Because of this success I have seen increased interest from other colleges and from the MBA program…spring will be an incredible class!

Lessons Learned

  • The student interview process and selection is critical
  • Undergraduates can handle the class
  • Students bounce back from the direct and sometimes tough live feedback
  • Align and train mentors to embrace customer development
  • Go for it!

——–

The next Lean LaunchPad class Jan 30th – Feb 1st is sold out (there is a wait list here.)  Registration is open for the June 18-20th class here.

Filed under: Lean LaunchPad | 8 Comments »

Customer Development in a Diagram

Posted on December 12, 2012 by steveblank

Customer Development in a diagram

Thanks to: Alexis Finch, Sketchnotes / UX Research Consultant @agentfin

Filed under: Customer Development | 8 Comments »

The Future of Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Posted on December 3, 2012 by steveblank

Almost every large company understands it needs to build an organization that deals with the ever-increasing external forces of continuous disruption, the need for continuous innovation, globalization and regulation.

But there is no standard strategy and structure for creating corporate innovation.

We outline the strategy problem in this post and will propose some specific organizational suggestions in follow-on posts.

—-

I’m sitting at the ranch with Alexander Osterwalder, Henry Chesbrough and Andre Marquis listening to them recount their lessons-learned consulting for some of the world’s largest corporations. I offered what I just learned from spending a day at the ranch with the R&D group of a $100 billion corporation along with the insights my Startup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf who has several Fortune 100 clients.Osterwalder Chesbrough Marquis

(Full disclosure. I’m recovering from a reading spree of Chandlers Strategy and Structure, Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management and The Other Side of Innovation by Trimble and Govindarajan, Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation, as well as The Innovator’s DNA from Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen. So some or most of this post might be that I’ve overdosed on business books for the month.)

Collectively we’re beginning to see a pattern and we want to offer some concrete suggestions about Corporate Management and Innovation strategy and the structural (i.e. organizational) changes corporations need to make.

If we’re right, it will give 21st companies a way to deal with innovation – both sustaining and disruptive – as a normal course of business rather than by exception or crisis. Companies will be organized around Continuous Innovation.

Strategy and Structure in the 21st Century
While companies have existed for the last 400 years, their modern form is less than 150 years old. In the U.S. the growth of railroads, telegraph, meat packers, steel and industrial equipment forced companies to deal with the strategies of how to organize a complex organization. In turn, these new strategies drove the need for companies to be structured around functions (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, etc.)

90 years ago companies faced new strategic pressures as physical distances in the United States limited the reach of day-to-day hands-on management. In addition, firms found themselves now managing diverse product lines. In response, another structural shift in corporate organization occurred. In the 1920’s companies restructured from monolithic functional organizations (sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, etc.) and reorganized into operating divisions (by product, territory, brand, etc.) each with its own profit and loss responsibility. This strategy-to-structure shift from functional organizations to operating divisions was led by DuPont and popularized by General Motors and quickly followed by Standard Oil and Sears.

GM 1925 org chart

General Motors Organization Chart ~1925

In each case, whether it was organizing by functions or organizing by operating divisions, the diagram we drew for management was an organization chart. Invented in 1854 by Daniel McCallum, superintendent of the New York and Erie railroad, the org chart became the organizing tool for how to think about strategy and structure.   It allowed companies to visually show command and control hierarchies – who’s responsible, what they are responsible for and who they manage underneath them, and report to above them.  (The irony is that while the org chart may have been new for companies, the hierarchies it described paralleled military organization and had been around since the Roman Legion.)

While org charts provided the “who” of a business, companies were missing a way to visualize the “how” of a business. In the 1990’s Strategy Maps provided the “How.” Evolved from Balanced Scorecards by Kaplan and Norton, Strategy Maps are a visual representation of an organization’s strategy. Strategy Maps are a tool to translate the strategy into specific actions and objectives to measure the progress of how the strategy gets implemented (but offer no help on how to create new strategies.).

Strategy Maps from Robert Kaplan

Strategy Maps from Robert Kaplan

By the 21st century, organizations still lacked a tool to create and formulate new strategies.  Enter the Business Model Canvas. The canvas describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value (economic, social, or other forms of value). The canvas ties together the “who and how” and provides the “why”. External to the canvas are the environmental influences (industry forces, market forces, key trends and macro-economic forces.)  With the business model canvas in hand, we can now approach rethinking corporate innovation strategy and structure.

Business Model Canvas

Management Innovation in the 21st Corporation
Existing companies and their operating divisions implement known business models. Using the business model canvas, they can draw how their organization is creating, delivering, and capturing value. A business model for an existing company or division is not filled with hypotheses, it is filled with a series of facts. Operating divisions execute the known business model. Plans and processes are in place, and rules, job specifications, revenue, profit and margin goals have been set. Forecasts can be based on a series of known conditions.

BusinessModel Innovation in existing companies

Inside existing companies and divisions, the business model canvas is used as a tool to implement and continuously improve existing business models incrementally. This might include new products, markets or acquisitions.

A New Strategy for Entrepreneurship in the 21st Corporation

Yet, simply focusing on improving existing business models is not enough anymore. To assure their survival and produce satisfying growth, corporations need to invent new business models. This challenge requires entirely new organizational structures and skills.

This is not unlike the challenges corporations were facing in the 1920′s. Companies then found that their existing strategy and structures (organizations) were inadequate to respond to a changing world. We believe that the solution for companies today is to realize that what they are facing is a strategy and structure problem, common to all companies.

The video below (from Strategyzer.com) emphasizes that companies will need to have an organization that can do two things at the same time:  executing and improving existing models and inventing  - new and disruptive – business models.

We propose that corporations equipped for the challenges of the 21st century think of innovation as a sliding scale between execution and search.

  1. For companies to survive in the 21st century they need to continually create a new set of businesses, by inventing new business models.
  2. Most of these new businesses need to be created outside of the existing business units.
  3. The exact form of the new business models is not known at the beginning. It only emerges after an intense business model design and search activity based on the customer development process.
  4. Companies will have to maintain a portfolio of new business model initiatives, not unlike a venture capital firm, and they will have to accept that maybe only 1 out 10 initiatives might succeed.
  5. To develop this new portfolio, companies need to provide a stable innovation funding mechanism for new business creation, one that is simply thought of as a cost of doing business
  6. Many of the operating divisions can and should provide resources to the new businesses inside the company
  7. We need a new organizational structure to manage the creation of new businesses and to coordinate the sharing of business model resources.
  8. Some of these new businesses might become new resources to the existing operating units in the company or they could grow into becoming the new profit generating business units of the company’s future.

In future blog posts we’ll propose a specific structure for Entrepreneurship and Continuous Innovation in the 21st Corporation.

Lessons Learned

  • Continuous disruption will be the norm for corporations in the 21st century
  • Continuous innovation – in the form of new businesses-  will be the path for long term corporate survival
  • Current corporate organizational models are inadequate for the task
  • We will propose some alternatives

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development | 25 Comments »

Open Source Entrepreneurship

Posted on November 27, 2012 by steveblank

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 Tools
If you’re building a startup, the Startup Tools tab on the top of this page has curated links to hundreds of startup resources.  Specific links are:

  • A list of startup tools is here
  • Market research tools to help you figure out the size of the opportunity your startup is pursuing, are here
  • Some of the best advice on founding and running a startup from other smart voices are here

Updates and suggestions for tools I’ve missed are welcomed on the Startup Tools comments page.

The Lean LaunchPad course online
I teach potential founders a hands-on, experiential class called the Lean LaunchPad at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia and Caltech. The class teaches the three basic skills all entrepreneurs need to know:

  • business model design
  • customer development
  • agile engineering

For my  Innovation Corps class for the National Science Foundation it made sense to record the lectures and put them on-line. In my regular classes I now “flip” the classroom and have my students watch these online lectures as homework and we use the class time for discussion.

The free on-line class, hosted at Udacity is here.

Class Syllabi, My Lecture Slides and Student Presentations
The Slides/Video tab on the top of this page has all the open source course material for my classes.  Specific links are:

  • Syllabi for all my classes are here
  • Educators Training Guide is here (it’s part of the Educators Course where we teach how to design a Lean Entrepreneurship Curriculum and how to teach the Lean LaunchPad class – described in the Educators section below.)
  • Secret Notes for Instructors here
  • Latest presentations posted click here
  • Stanford presentations, lectures and syllabus here
  • Berkeley presentations, lectures and syllabus here
  • Columbia 5-day presentations, lectures and syllabus here
  • Caltech 5-day presentations, lectures and syllabus here
  • Some general customer development slides click here

The Entreprenuers Checklist
The good folks at Udemy have taken a few of my lectures at Stanford and put them together in a series online.

The free on-line lectures, hosted at Udemy are here.

Online Guide to How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad
Startupplays.com, publisher of online entrepreneurs processes guides, drew from my Udacity course and The Startup Owner’s Manual to create a free step-by-step guide to understanding your customers and creating your value proposition. Called “How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad,” it walks you through the Business Model Canvas and an overview of the customer development process.

Find it here.

Videos
The Slides/Video tab on the top of this page has a number of my talks on entrepreneurship, customer development and startup, some short, some long, and a few interesting.

Find them here.

Recommended Reading
The Books for startups tab on the top of this page is my recommended reading list. These books have influenced my thinking. There’s a short synopsis of why I like each book.

Updates and suggestions for books that I’ve missed are welcomed on the books comment page.

Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley
The Guide tab on the top of this page? I got tired watching dignitaries fly into Silicon Valley, visit Google, Facebook, Apple, and Stanford and then say they understand startups and entrepreneurship.

So for the rest of us I put together this Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley.

Updates and suggestions for places to see that I’ve missed are welcomed on the Guide comments page.

Secret History of Silicon Valley
What began as a hobby of mine – research in the intersection of my military, intelligence and Silicon Valley careers combined with my interest in the history of Silicon Valley and technology entrepreneurship – ended up in this video and PowerPoint presentation. I first gave the Secret History of Silicon Valley presentation as an invited talk at Google, then at the Computer History Museum.

When I gave the talk to audience of CIA staffers they asked how I came up with the talk, so I wrote a series of posts as the back-story that can be found here.

I still love giving this talk to people who lived it and people curious about it.

Almost Free:

Startup Weekend Next
Startup Weekend Next is a three-week version of the Lean LaunchPad class with hands-on instructors and mentors – offered in hundreds of cities around the world.

  • The class is organized, led and delivered by Startup Weekend, the global non-profit that teaches entrepreneurs how to launch a startup in 54 hours.
  • TechStars and Startup America are partnering to provide mentors in the U.S.

They don’t ask for equity and charge just enough to cover the costs of pizza and the room rental.

Sign up here.

The Lean LaunchPad Educators Course
Hosted by NCIIA, Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, Jerry Engel and I teach a course for educators interested in learning how to update and revise their entrepreneurship curriculum for the 21st century as well as learning how to teach the Lean LaunchPad class.

The Lean LaunchPad Educators Training Guide here is part of this course.

Next class is Jan 30th. Click here for more information.

The Startup Owner’s Manual
The Startup Owners Manual written with Bob Dorf, has become the step-by-step reference manual for anyone even thinking about a startup. Each section offers detailed guidance and how-to’s, helping you make your way through the Customer Development process using MVP’s and Pivots as you search for a Business Model.

Last month we added a Kindle version, reorganized to make it easier to follow on a tablet and incorporating hundreds of links to websites, blog posts, and presentations.

The Founder’s Workbook
Zoomstra, the publisher of online workbooks offers The Founders Workbook to help you track and monitor your progress through every step of the Customer Development process. It takes the static 57 checklists from The Startup Owner’s Manual and makes them dynamic and accessible by putting them online as an interactive checklist. Use it to keep your team on track and ensure you have completed each critical task as you search for a scalable business model.

Click here for more information.

The Four Steps to The Epiphany
The Four Steps to the Epiphany has been described as the book that launched the Lean Startup movement. The book is still relevant today as when it was written. The last two chapters deal with scale and management of growing startups.

Now get out of the building and make something happen!

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 30 Comments »

Careers Start by Peeling Potatoes

Posted on November 23, 2012 by steveblank

Listening to my the family talk about dividing up the cooking chores for this Thanksgiving dinner, including who would peel the potatoes, reminded me that most careers start by peeling potatoes.

KP – Kitchen Patrol
One of the iconic punishments in basic training in the military was being threatened by our drill instructors of being assigned to KP – Kitchen Patrol – as a penalty for breaking some rule. If you got assigned to KP you were sent to the base kitchen and had to peel potatoes all day for all the soldiers on the base.  It was tedious work but to my surprise I found that it wasn’t the dreadful experience our drill instructors made it out to be. But working in the mess hall, the real eye-opener was the inside look at the workings of something I took for granted – how do you cook three meals a day for 10,000 people at a time. Peeling potatoes was a small bit in the thousands of things that had to go right every day to keep 10,000 of us fed.

One my first career lessons: stop taking for granted finished goods and appreciate the complexity of the system that delivered them.

Solutions From Hands On
When I got to my first airbase my job was lugging electronics boxes on and off fighter planes under the broiling hot Thailand sun, to bring them into the technicians inside the air-conditioned shop, to troubleshoot and fix. The thing we dreaded hearing from the techs was, “this box checks out fine, it must be a wiring problem.” Which meant going back to the aircraft trying to find a bent pin in a connector or short in a cable or a bad antenna. It meant crawling over, under and inside an airplane fuselage the temperature of an oven. Depending on the type of aircraft (F-4’s, F-105’s or A-7’s – the worst) it could take hours or days to figure out where the problem was.

A few months later, I was now the guy in the air-conditioned shop telling my friends on the flight-line, “the box was fine, must be a cable.” Having just been on the other side I understood the amount of work that phrase meant. It took a few weeks of these interactions, but it dawned on me there was a gap between the repair manuals describing how to fix the electronics and the aircraft manuals telling you the pin-outs of the cables – there were no tools to simplify finding broken cables on the flightline. Now with a bit more understanding of the system problem, it didn’t take much thinking to look at the aircraft wiring diagrams and make up a series of dummy connectors with test points to simplify the troubleshooting process. I gave them to my friends, and while the job of finding busted aircraft cabling was still unpleasant it was measurably shorter.

My next career lesson: unless I had been doing the miserable, hot and frustrating job on the flightline, I would never have known this was a valuable problem to solve.

Up From the Bottom
My startup career started on the bottom, installing process control equipment inside auto assembly plants and steel mills (in awe of the complexity of the systems that delivered finished products.) Wrote technical manuals and taught microprocessor design (to customers who knew more than I did.) Worked weeks non-stop responding to customer Requests For Proposals (RFP’s.) Designed tradeshow booths, spent long nights at shows setting them up, and long days inside them during the shows.

Over ten long years I wrote corporate brochures (making legal, finance and sales happy), and sales presentations (treading the line between sales, marketing, truth, and competition), and data sheets, web sites and competitive analyses, press releases (getting a degree in creative writing without being an English major,) and flew to hundreds of customer meetings on red-eyes at a drop of a hat (making sales guys rich and gaining a huge appreciation for their skills.)

Partnered with engineering trying to understand what customers really wanted, needed and would pay for, versus what we could actually build and deliver (and learning the difference between a simply good engineer and working in the presence of sheer genius.) In the sprint to first customer ship, slept under the desk in my office the same nights my engineering team was doing the same.

Each of those crummy, tedious, exhausting jobs made me understand how hard they were. Each made me appreciate the complexity of the systems (with people being the most valuable) that make up successful companies. It made me understand that they were doable, solvable and winnable.

It took me a decade to work my way up to VP of Marketing and then CEO. By that time I knew what each job in my department meant because I had done every one of them. I knew what it took to get these jobs done (and screw them up) and I now pushed the people who worked for me as hard as I had worked.

Career Lessons Learned:

  • Winning at entrepreneurship is for practitioners not theorists.
  • Building a company in all its complexity is computationally unsolvable.
  • There’s no shortcut for getting your hands dirty. Reading stories about the success of Facebook or blogs about the secrets of SEO might make you feel smarter, but it’s not going to make you more skilled.
  • Unless you’ve had a ton of experience (which includes failing) in a broad range of areas you’re only guessing.
  • Great careers start by peeling potatoes.

Filed under: Air Force, Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture | 25 Comments »

Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Posted on November 13, 2012 by steveblank

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 Development in Japan.

————-

To celebrate the debut of the Japan edition of “The Startup Owner’s Manual” and to express great thanks to Steve and his co-author Bob Dorf, I would like to reflect back what first drew me to this book and offer Steve’s worldwide readers a look at the progress of Customer Development and the Lean LaunchPad class in Japan.

The Crater in my rookie days
Back in 1990’s, I was working for one of the leading sogo shohsa (trading company) in Japan, building data communications startups. After helping build the first Ethernet switch startup, I was attracted by Asynchronous Transfer Mode 25Mbit/sec technology, (ATM25) which was 2.5x faster than Ethernet and ran data but plus voice and video. Leveraging my marketing skills, I successfully made what Steve calls an “onslaught launch”, generating a lot of press coverage and apparent early success. But customers didn’t agree. After many sales calls, early prospects showed little rush to buy it! I got comments like, “Well, ATM25 is interesting technology, but I have no need to rush to buy it” or “I like ATM25 very much, but we need to replace my existing infrastructure to appreciate multimedia features, which I do not think that important.” I discovered my product was a “nice to have,” not a “must have,” and we shut the company down a year a later.

This made me believe deeply in the extreme importance of talking to customers before investing time and money, something I took to my next startup. The result: great success of my third startup, a load balancing technology for web servers back in the late 1990’s.

Finding a repeatable process for startups
Despite my success based on talking to customers upfront, however, I wasn’t confident I could replicate startup success consistently without a clear, and repeatable process to talk to customers. By then, I had become a venture capitalist at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and found myself talking to a lot of entrepreneurs who were proclaiming their great technology yet were struggling with little revenue, and claiming they were “crossing the chasm”. However, when I looked into the detail, most of them did not have even early adaptors and the problem wasn’t “chasm crossing,” it was that almost nobody wanted their products.

In 2004, Googling terms like “high tech marketing” and “startup” I discovered “The Four Steps to The Epiphany” at Cafépress.com. Amazon did not carry it yet, and I was nervous spending money at a website known mostly for cups and t-shirts, completely irrelevant to business books. After waiting for a week or so for the book to make it to Japan, I was very much shocked how impressed I was by the Customer Development Model detailed in the book. A few of the many quotations that struck me:

  • “Most startups fail due not to the failure of product development but due to the lack of customers”
  • “Learning and discovering who a company’s initial customers will be and what market they are in, requires a process separate and distinct from product development”
  • “All a startup has are mere hypotheses,” and
  • “in a startup no facts exist inside the building, get out of the building to talk to customers”

This was exactly what I was searching for.

The first meeting with Steve
After my reading The Four Steps to The Epiphany several times, my Customer Development conviction got stronger. I wanted this book not only as my “secret weapon,” but also for all entrepreneurs in Japan.

I sent Steve a cold email to allow me to translate the book into Japanese and evangelize Customer Development in Japan. Steve responded to my email in ten minutes, saying “come meet with me!” Soon we had our first meeting Steve’s favorite spot, Café Borrone on El Camino Real.

After listening to me for fifteen minutes, Steve said “Go ahead. I will support you”.  It was very, very happy moment for me.

I was extremely surprised that he gave a huge trust on completely unknown and strange Japanese VC who suddenly contacted him by email. We kept talking, with Steve asking “How long are you staying in Silicon Valley?” When I told him, “two more days,” he asked, “Are you interested in meeting with venture firms in the Valley?”  When I said of course, but who would meet with me with two days notice, he picked up his mobile phone and, surprisingly for me, started dialing … and I actually had a great meeting with one of them the very next day. More “pay it forward” culture in action.

Evangelizing Customer Development in Japan
After that meeting, I started working on the translation word by word over a number of weekends and published the Japanese edition of “The Four Steps Epiphany” in May 2009 (now in its third printing.)  Since then, I have been teaching Customer Development and running Lean LaunchPad style classes at variety of universities, national research laboratories, incubators, and startup communities throughout Japan.

After three years of evangelizing, I am very pleased to see success cases emerging in Japan by following Customer Development Model. For example, Maysee, a business card cloud services startup, got out of the building and then developed an MVP, avoiding costly UI development that customers in fact found no need for. They pivoted the product by implementing Google like wide-open search windows requested time and again in customer interviews. Maysee now enjoys hockey stick revenue growth.

Goryo Chemical, new fluorescent probe for Chemical biology startups (leveraging a technology from a university), found early in Customer Discovery that the original value proposition hypothesis was wrong, but one other feature was in fact very valuable. Their pivot resulted in great deal of customer tractions.

These kinds of success cases continue to happen in Japan’s startup community and in corporations that have to innovate to remain competitive in the global market.

Customer Development Education
Customer Development is growing fast here in Japan, with Lean LaunchPad programs in great demand among entrepreneurs and “wanabees” learning to build hypothesis and test them by getting out of the building. Some have actually established new startups with tested business model hypotheses under their belt. Lean LaunchPad teaches entrepreneurs, to test their business model until they find customers who are eager to buy, and a business model that scales profitably and repeatedly. I am confident we will see real startups and business emerge soon.

Lean LaunchPad class at Hosei University business school

Much more is happening with collaborative learning and tools, and I am looking forward to more Customer Development success ahead as more entrepreneurs, investors, and educators read the new book, The Startup Owner’s Manual.

In fact, I recently started my Customer Development blog with my partner, Masato Iino, to accumulate the learning and discovery of Customer Development and Lean LaunchPad in Japan, and to update readers with more concepts and tools to do Customer Development in their startups.

Lessons Learned – Japanese Style

  • Failure comes often, but failure is mother of success.  To appreciate a “mother,” it is important to improve from the failure and to look for a solution continuously to do a better job with a solution, hopefully resulting in a great success.
  • Pushing the boundaries collaboratively is really powerful.  Try collaborative learning by leveraging global intelligence and passion of entrepreneurs.
  • Pay-it-forward culture actually exists.  But, the key is for me to transfer the same culture to my next generation by giving them an opportunity like the one I appreciated.

Takashi Tsutsumi
ttutumi@gmail.com

本ブログ記事の内容は、堤孝志個人の見解に基づいており、所属する組織の見解を示すものではありません。

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 8 Comments »

Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 66,153 other followers