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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup.

Lean 335
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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Customer Discovery. He worked hard to deeply understand the customer problems of these two customer segments.

Cofounder 336
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Beyond the Lemonade Stand: How to Teach High School Students Lean Startups

Steve Blank

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation, the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” Customer Discovery in the Real World. These two startups served as the students’ introduction to customer development methodology.

Lean 334
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Lean Meets Wicked Problems

Steve Blank

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

Lean 294
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How To Find the Right Co-Founders?

Steve Blank

How do you figure out what’s the right mix of skills for the co-founders of your startup? I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Trying to figure out what the right set of co-founders isn’t so clear.

Cofounder 335
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It's time for lean philanthropy: a case study

Startup Lessons Learned

I’ve long been an advocate of using Lean Startup principles to advance non-profits and philanthropic organizations, whose work is so urgently needed at this moment in history. In this blog post, I want to share the story of a lean pop-up organization called HelpKitchen. SF New Deal and Frontline Foods were early leaders.

Lean 128
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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. Now he’s a leader in social impact investing and equality in education.

Lean 165