Steve Blank

We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery.

Sign up at http://h4r.stanford.edu

The post-pandemic world will be a very different place. The Covid-19 virus has upended traditional ways of doing business, travel, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc. How do these institutions reconfigure and reinvent themselves? What new businesses and services will emerge? Hacking 4 Recovery provides students with the tools to understand the new normal and to build innovative solutions for recovery.

Out of crisis – Opportunity
Do you have a startup idea or new technology that you’d like to learn how to bring to market in the post-pandemic economy? Or perhaps you would like to join a team creating a new business, or reinventing an existing business, and learn the lean startup techniques that will be critical to our recovery.

Stanford’s Lean LaunchPad
Hacking 4 Recovery is a 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad / Hacking For Defense / National Science Foundation I-Corps curriculum that’s trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators. This class offers students a unique online opportunity to build the future with the Stanford University instructors who have inspired a generation of entrepreneurs.

The first 5-day class will be aimed at “Finding New Business Models” for businesses to adapt and pivot to find new customers, new markets, new products and new services to win in the recovery. Additional 5-day-long classes will explore Health, Travel and Hospitality, Food Service, Entertainment and Education.

Course Description
This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a company or to find a new business model for an existing one. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It’s not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research to size markets.

This class combines theory with a ton of hands-on practice. Our goal, within the constraints of a virtual classroom and a limited amount of time, is to give you a framework to test a business model.

You will be virtually “getting your hands dirty” by talking to customers, partners and competitors as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup (or a restart) actually works.

You’ll practice evidence-based entrepreneurship as you learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and formulate their hypothesis. Next, you’ll use customer development to virtually get out of the classroom and talk to 10-15 customers/ partners each day to validate whether your assumptions are correct, and to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product or service. Finally, based on the customer and market feedback you gathered, you will use agile development to build Minimal Viable Products (incremental and iterative prototypes) to show prospective customers each day to see if customers would actually buy and use. Each day will be a new adventure outside the classroom as you test each part of your business model and then share the hard earned knowledge with the rest of the class.

This class is team-based.  (We’ll help Individuals without a team find a place on one.) Working and studying will be done in teams. You will be admitted as a team. Teams must submit a proposal for entry before the class begins. Projects must be approved before the class.

The teams will self-organize and establish individual roles on their own.

Hacking 4 Recovery Instructors and Team

• Steve Blank, Tina Seelig, Steve Weinstein, Tom Bedecarré, Mar Hershenson, and Pete Newell
• Mentors, advisors and subject matter experts to support the teams

Class Dates
Five Hacking 4 Recovery 5-day online classes will be offered this summer:

• First session: Monday, June 29^th to Friday, July 3rd at 4-7pm Pacific
• Second session: Monday, July 13^th to Friday, July 17th at 4-7pm Pacific
• Third session: Monday, August 3^rd to Friday, August 7th at 4-7pm Pacific
• Fourth session: TBD
• Fifth session: TBD

Find Out More – Info Sessions
We’ll be offering a series of information sessions describing the class, expectations and the application process.

May 21  4:00 PM PDT  Information session
May 28  12:00 PM PDT  Information session

Signup at the website at http://h4r.stanford.edu

Who Can Attend?
Hacking 4 Recovery is open to Stanford undergraduate and graduate students, as well as all Stanford faculty, staff and alumni. Students visiting Stanford for the summer are also invited to apply for this free course, (if they are registered for at least one Summer Session course (3-unit minimum).

The class is team-based. Priority is given to teams of 3 to 5. We will hold team formation mixers and help you find additional team members or teams to join.

June 4  4:00 PM PDT  Team formation mixer and Q&A
June 11  12:00 PM PDT  Team formation mixer and Q&A
June 18  4:00 PM PDT  Team formation mixer and Q&A
June 25  4:00 PM PDT  Team formation mixer and Q&A

Signup at the website at http://h4r.stanford.edu

Summer Startup Accelerators
Students who take the Hacking 4 Recovery class will have an opportunity to be apply for affiliated summer startup accelerators and incubators, including Pear VC, Stanford Venture Studio, H4XLabs and others.

For More Information
For more information or to apply online, please check out our Hacking 4 Recovery website at http://h4r.stanford.edu or email us at hacking4recovery@gmail.com

Join this class and help restart our economy.

Filed under: Covid-19/Recovery, Hacking for Recovery |