article thumbnail

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business.

Startup Lessons Learned

For a little while, the team can resort to the last defense of entrepreneurs in trouble: the promised hockey-stick. One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive characteristic is the long, flat part. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us: A hockey stick shaped growth curve. People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part. Go on an agile diet quickly. Labels: agile , customer development 15comments: Scott Shapiro said. Great post!

Customer 167
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: A hierarchy of pitches

Startup Lessons Learned

Ill exclude those non- lean startups who basically exist for the purpose of raising bigger and bigger sums of money. Most important slide: hockey stick Micro-scale results Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? How does a lean start-up find the all-star team worthy of pitching? Expo SF (May.

article thumbnail

Are Google-Scale Outcomes More Frequent? ? AGILEVC

Agile VC

As a result of a convergence of many factors (lean startup methodology, broadband & smartphone penetration, social web, cloud computing, etc), breakout startups are clearly getting scale faster than they used to. Im a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned East Coast VC.

article thumbnail

Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Even more serious, startups can have radically different cash needs.

article thumbnail

“Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch

Steve Blank

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. You already have the hockey stick and exponential growth.