Courting Content, Not Controversy

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning. But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point: TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that…

via Start Up:

Courting Content, Not Controversy

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.

Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning.

But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point:

• TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that included an app called “Titstare” and, separately, a guy on stage simulating masturbation. Whether intended as jokes, plenty of people saw them as far from funny.


• CES—the giant Consumer Electronics Show—was most noted for a booth in which four women were hired to appear in nothing but thongs, pasties and blue body paint. Thousands of attendees, men and women, tweeted and talked about why this and other, similar displays, made them uncomfortable.


• Rape jokes were directed at a woman on stage at a Microsoft’s E3 press conference.


• A woman was sexually assaulted by her boss during the drinking scene at a Ruby conference. (She detailed the event on her blog, and it was corroborated in posts by at least two witnesses. After receiving hundreds of rape and death threats in the comments on her post, she took it down. A small piece of the original post is quoted here.)


• We probably don’t need to remind you about Adria Richards’s experience at PyCon, where two men behind her during a keynote talk made sexual jokes. After reporting the incident via Twitter, she was subject not only to a tsunami of rape and death threats, but she was also fired and doxxed, which had additional ramifications. (We’re proud to have had hosted her as a speaker last year and a mentor this year.)

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Here’s a list from Courtney Stanton of other, similar episodes over the past few years. And here’s a “timeline of incidents” on the GeekFeminism Wiki dating back to 1973, plus a list of sexually objectifying presentations from the past decade. If you follow news around business conferences and those affiliated with the tech sector, you’ll know these examples are just the very tip of the iceberg.

We don’t want to be the conference hosts who have to write an apology after our event. We do want to do our best to actively support productive dialog among all conference participants. In line with our efforts toward transparency, and in hopes of encouraging other conference hosts to take pro-active measures to foster awesome professional spaces, here’s what we’re doing this year.

We’ve published our code of conduct, which lays out the conditions for participating in the conference for all us: speakers, sponsors, attendees, staff and volunteers. We invite you to take a look. As you’ll see, our code of conduct insists that conference participants think of ours as a professional event, and that everyone conducts themselves accordingly. That might mean that some of us have to think carefully before joking around, flirting with coworkers, taking pictures, etc. and err on the side of caution. We’re comfortable with that mild restriction. For the good of the community, we’re looking to create the most vibrant and thorough possible exchange of ideas, one in which a range of people are able to fully talk and listen.

Teresa Nielsen-Hayden—who is not only the foremost expert on managing online comments, but who also runs a blog with the best discussions perhaps on the whole internet—has pointed out that if you create an atmosphere in which anyone can say anything, you will necessarily give prominence to offensive comments and hateful behavior, because people who don’t like or can’t tolerate that sort of thing won’t participate. In other words, there’s a tradeoff when you have no rules. If there’s a tradeoff in having rules, and it’s that some of us will have to speak thoughtfully when in the public areas of events and, perhaps, apologize if we offend people, we’re all in favor of that exchange.

We train our staff, and we invite you to speak up. As far as we know, The Lean Startup Conference does not have a history of participants’ behaving in ways that would violate our code. But, frankly, we can’t be sure, because a common effect of harassment is that people feel they can’t or shouldn’t report it. We’re hoping to make it as easy as possible to speak up if you experience or see a problem. The code of conduct includes phone and email for our executive producer, who will contact the two of us immediately if she receives a report. In addition, we’re training our staff and volunteers on a straightforward procedure for responding to reports.

We review all speaker and sponsor materials for inappropriate imagery. The professional environment of the conference is established in no small part on the stage. To take in the material of the conference, attendees need to be able to feel open to what’s coming from the podium, not braced for potential shocks. So we’re aiming to ensure that any visual materials displayed on stage, or associated with the conference via sponsorship, fall within the range of what anyone would consider professionally appropriate. Lolcats: yes. Rape jokes: no.

Our speaker roster is diverse, setting a tone for the event. We’ve talked about this at some length recently, but to reiterate here, we have, through extensive outreach and a meritocratic application process, created a roster of speakers that is more than half women and people of color. We’ve also sought out new attendees by posting to a variety of mailing lists, and through partnerships with a number of organizations. We did not reach out to 4chan.

We’re limiting alcohol at onsite events. We want attendees to have fun, but this thing is not a frat party. And is should come as no surprise that many harassing, offensive actions at conferences take place at receptions and other events where alcohol has, by tradition, flowed freely. The Lean Startup Conference is addressing issues important to professionals, and that’s the tone we want to foster, including during social events. We’re thankful in particular to Pivotal Labs, which is sponsoring our reception on Monday, December 9 and is working with us to create networking opportunities that are effective, inviting, and work beautifully when you aren’t three drinks in.

By talking about our intentions, we hope to draw those of you who are eager to help us create a very lively scene at The Lean Startup Conference—one where you really can learn from each other and have an amazing time as your brain lights up. If you haven’t registered yet, please do so now. We want you to be part of this great event.

via Lessons Learned:

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful. We believe most conference hosts aim to create a great atmosphere for learning.But as an endless number of conference episodes have shown, you can’t leave that to chance. Among the dozens of recent examples we’re aware of, here are just a few from 2013 alone that make the point:TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with hackathon demos that included an app called “Titstare” and, separately, a guy on stage simulating masturbation. Whether intended as jokes, plenty of people saw them as far from funny. CES—the giant Consumer Electronics Show—was most noted for a booth in which four women were hired to appear in nothing but thongs, pasties and blue body paint. Thousands of attendees, men and women, tweeted and talked about why this and other, similar displays, made them uncomfortable. Rape jokes were directed at a woman on stage at a Microsoft’s E3 press conference. A woman was sexually assaulted by her boss during the drinking scene at a Ruby conference. (She detailed the event on her blog, and it was corroborated in posts by at least two witnesses. …

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Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Lean Startup techniques have beentaking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solveproblems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’sworking on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5at10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profitand mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to getcloser to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and ourspeakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducinga special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff andvolunteers to the conference in December. More …

via Start Up:

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Lean Startup techniques have been

taking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solve

problems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’s

working on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5at

10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profit

and mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to get

closer to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and our

speakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducing

a special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff and

volunteers to the conference in December. More details on that at the end of

this post.

Few people are

better positioned to talk about bringing Lean Startup techniques to

mission-driven organizations than Akash Trivedi and Christie George, both

speakers at The Lean Startup Conference in December. Akash is a business lead

for Kiva’s pilot program Kiva Zip, which seeks to make microlending even more

direct—for example, by facilitating payment via mobile. Christie is director of

New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel

investors supporting media and tech startups that disrupt politics and catalyze

progressive change.

We asked Christie to give a sense of how she sees the

relationship between Lean Impact and Lean Startup.

LSC: Do you see Lean Impact as a direct application of Lean

Startup ideas in non-profit and mission-driven organizations, or is there

another element to it that’s not so obvious?

Christie: There are huge opportunities to build better

mission-driven organizations using Lean Startup principles. And “Lean Impact”

offers a reference point for people to start that conversation—there is real

power in naming. I think of Lean Impact more generally as the conversation

about the challenges in addition to

the opportunities of applying Lean

Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations and businesses.

There are some specific challenges that I’m looking forward to

discussing, both with Akash and at the conference:

1) Measuring Impact: For

organizations that are in the “business” of social change, questions

of measurement are notoriously tricky. How do you measure a movement for social

justice? How do you measure that it’s actually your work that’s moving the needle on an issue? The clear

focus on users and revenue is hugely useful for

measurement, but for organizations serving a population and not

building a ‘product’, the language and culture of Lean Startup is still finding its

focus.

2) Vanity Metrics: Especially for

those working to increase awareness, social change groups often

report member numbers, Facebook likes, and news hits as proxies for

impact (which may in turn generate further

revenue). Metrics around petition signatures or Facebook likes are

relatively easy to track, but of course, they don’t tell you whether

you’re winning. How can we come up with impact metrics that go

further than vanity and get to the core outcomes we’re working to achieve?

3) Customer Development: In the

social change space, the customer who “pays” (e.g. a foundation) is

often not the beneficiary of the service. In some cases, this is a standard

three-sided market problem, but it often goes deeper than

this. Mission-driven entrepreneurs are disrupting more than markets, and

are therefore choosing to address issues of power and culture that may not fit

neatly into the customer framework.

4) Failing Real People: Entrepreneurs

in the social sector are solving big, gnarly, complicated problems. The costs

of experimentation (and failure) can be high. I’ve been reminded by social

entrepreneurs, “When we fail, we fail real people.” That is humbling,

even daunting. But it’s important to remember that it is a privilege to be able

to run experiments in order to fail fast.

The most exciting thing for me is that

a community of practice is starting to develop around Lean

Impact, with best practices and actual case studies, to guide

entrepreneurs navigating these issues. And we’ve got some great examples of

people and organizations doing it well—from the data-driven culture of online

advocacy groups to the relentless testing that Kiva Zip has

done, something that Akash will speak to directly. [Editors’ note: The Ultimate Glossary of Lean for Social Good, from the folks at LeanImpact.org,

has some great examples (PDF).]

LSC: One key element of Lean Startup is the idea of organizing a

startup around multifunctional teams. In mission-driven organizations, how do

you see teams reorganizing to apply Lean Impact ideas?

There is a pretty wide variety of organizations that fit into

the social sector—from large, traditional non-profit organizations to

nimble technology enterprises. Some of these organizations are just

beginning to be exposed to Lean Startup thinking, while others have deep

experience with experimentation.

The space that I work in—online advocacy—has a long history

of running controlled experiments and using A/B testing to

measure and optimize campaigns. I’ve also observed that these groups—everyone

from MoveOn.org, Change.org, UltraViolet, Upworthy—have comparatively flat

structures.

But even more than reorganizing teams, the work of Lean Impact

seems to be one of making a change in the organizational culture. Social entrepreneurs are working to get institutions to

understand the value of taking risks. I see digital teams gaining influence

within larger organizations, as well as a generation of entrepreneurs building

new types of social businesses and organizations

that are embedding Lean Startup principals from the start.

–

For a deeper dive into the challenges and opportunities facing

Lean Impact organizations, register for our webcast on November 5 at 10a PT. And

join us at the Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11 in San Francisco. If

you’re part of a non-profit organization and are interested in Lean Impact

ideas, we strongly encourage you to apply for our scholarship program. We are

offering a dedicated group of scholarships specifically for non-profit

organizations, their staff and volunteers. We are particularly interested in smaller

organizations that otherwise would find the conference financially out of

reach. So, the smaller your org and the tighter your budget, the more we want

to hear from you. Just fill out an application, and we’ll follow up with you asap.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Lean Startup techniques have been taking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solve problems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’s working on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5 at 10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profit and mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to get closer to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and our speakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducing a special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff and volunteers to the conference in December. More details on that at the end of this post.Few people are better positioned to talk about bringing Lean Startup techniques to mission-driven organizations than Akash Trivedi and Christie George, both speakers at The Lean Startup Conference in December. Akash is a business lead for Kiva’s pilot program Kiva Zip, which seeks to make microlending even more direct—for example, by facilitating payment via mobile. Christie is director of New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel investors supporting media and tech startups that disrupt politics and catalyze progressive change.We asked Christie to give a sense of how she sees the relationship between Lean Impact and Lean Startup.LSC: Do you see Lean Impact as a direct application of Lean Startup ideas in non-profit and mission-driven organizations, or is there another element to it that’s not so obvious?Christie: There are huge opportunities to build better mission-driven organizations using Lean Startup principles. And “Lean Impact” offers a reference point for people to start that conversation—there is real power in naming. I think of Lean Impact more generally as the conversation about the challenges in addition to the opportunities of applying Lean Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations and businesses.There are some specific challenges that I’m looking forward to discussing, both with Akash and at the conference:1) Measuring Impact: For organizations that are in the “business” of social change, questions of measurement are notoriously tricky. …

For more info: Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter. About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock…

via Start Up:

Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter.

About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock photo site founded in 2003 that now encompasses twelve cross-functional teams and is one of the world’s largest two-sided marketplaces. Ari Gesher is a senior engineer at Palantir Technologies, creating data-mining software for government and financial clients. Palantir, founded in 2004, had 15 employees when Ari started there; it now has 1,000 employees and $1B in contracts. Wyatt and Ari will both be speaking at The Lean Startup Conference in December.

The first topic that came up is one that people in younger companies will want to know about—what’s hyper-growth actually like? What would it help to know about it before it happens?

Ari: “Having been through hyper-growth or exponential growth, you hear about these other organizations that have been through that and you look at your Googles and your Facebooks and you sort of knew them when they were smaller, and you see them as these behemoths. And what you don’t realize is that there’s almost no graceful way to go through that kind of growth. It’s painful no matter what. We had a year where we doubled size from around 400 to 800, and so you end this year where you have half the company’s been there for less than a year. And all the old ways of doing things are busting at their seams…. It’s a good problem to have. It means that hiring’s working, the business is working – but when you’re going at that speed and that growth, I think it’s something humans just weren’t even built for…. It’s going to be painful. And if there’s one lesson to take away, I guess it’s, ‘Know that it’s going to be painful, and don’t be afraid that that means you’re doing something wrong.’”

Wyatt: “There’s a certain point at which all the things you didn’t want to have to do when you started a company, you now not only have to do, but you have to do them well. You have to really know how to run a meeting, to keep it efficient and keep people wanting to go and be productive. You have to get really good at onboarding practices and the things that when you started a company you thought, I don’t want to do any of that, I just want to build stuff. But now suddenly all those soft skills become the key to your organization.”

Another portion of the conversation centered on the role Lean Startup techniques usually associated with smaller companies can have in a scaling business— specifically, a Five Whys (a technique for discovering the root causes of a failure, which Eric explains in detail in the webcast) and testing.

Ari: “We started doing Five Whys when we were I’d say probably around 100 people. And at that point I might argue you maybe don’t even need it. But it’s important to get it to start being part of the culture, because the point at which you need it is when you’re bigger, when you have a lot of complexity in the way the organization interacts, and the whole point of asking ‘why’ five times is that you’re going to come up with some really surprising results that have to do with everybody doing what they thought was right, but because of the way information doesn’t really flow or process interlocks… the problem is actually four or five layers deeper than where you thought it was. And that only happens at scale.”

Wyatt: “I think testing culture is one of the most important parts of keeping yourself Lean as you scale. And the reason is that people have a direct connection to results without having to go up and down the chain of command. When I meet companies that are struggling a lot with hierarchy or struggling with bureaucracy, a lot of the time the data and results about things are trapped in pockets of the organization and other parts of the organization have to fight to get at it. But if you have a true testing culture, whenever somebody says something in a meeting like, ‘I think X,’ and someone else goes, ‘That’s a nice hypothesis. Let’s go try that out,’ I think that healthy level of testing keeps you lean, it keeps you close to the customer, and that’s one of the things that I think helps us a lot – testing.

Hiring, recruiting, and training (or perhaps fostering – the correct term to use was hard to settle on) played a big role in this conversation. Having more employees doesn’t mean that each hire is less important – it means that the processes around hiring need to develop to meet the company’s needs. But those are constantly changing. So what goes into acquiring and supporting the best employees?

Wyatt: “One thing I try to avoid is dogmatism. If somebody’s really into a process, like really, really into it, to where they’re inflexible, they’re probably not ready for a hyper-growth organization, because whatever it is you’re dogmatic about, it ain’t gonna work in another six months. So when I see that dogmatism I immediately recognize that, wow, this person’s going to have trouble when we’re a completely different company in a year. I always like to look back at my own job and say, you know, I’m doing a completely different job today than I was a year ago, and the year before that, and the year before that. That’s hyper-growth. And in hyper-growth, I promise you whatever you hold near and dear will be incorrect – soon.”

Ari: “You can’t train people to have a different mindset…. The important thing to do as leaders is bring in priming, to give people permission to be uncomfortable. To say, hey, we’re gonna go through this, and some stuff’s gonna be broken, don’t freak out. It’s when they’re not ready for it, when they’re not aware that that doesn’t mean that there’s actually anything existentially wrong, [that you have a problem]….. The psychological effect of priming is really important. If you give people a framework on which to hang their experiences before they encounter them, it makes it much easier for them to digest them and understand them as they encounter [them].”

Though a company may expand from two to 2,000, Eric, Wyatt and Ari all agreed on the importance of maintaining a structure of small, cross-functional teams, rather than siloed divisions (for more on that, see our last webcast on Lean Startup in the Enterprise).

Wyatt: “We’re still in love with the ‘two-pizza team’…just in general if it takes more than two pizzas to feed the team, the team’s too big. We like our teams to be small, relatively autonomous, very autonomous in some cases, depending on the kind of work they’re doing. We treat the teams like startups, we like that ‘us against the world’ mentality of small, autonomous teams.” And, later: “I don’t think we can say that enough: Let the product team figure out what they’re building. If you’re trying to micro-manage that on a high level, across lots of teams, you’re not smart enough [to pull it off], I promise. You really have to point into a direction, have a few high-level metrics, and let your teams fill in the gaps, let them be autonomous. That was a big lesson for me, at least.”

Ari, on creating community while maintaining multiple teams: “We foster all kinds of extra-curricular activities, everything from people doing tabletop games to sponsoring a team in a basketball league to having video game rooms. A lot of these things exist here and they may look like perks…but they’re actually about building the non-obvious links, the non-formal links between teams to really start to create a community. And I think everything you can do to invest in making that place – a business – actually a community, where people live their lives and meet each other, and have a lot of trust – that goes a long way toward making the company feel smaller. And then you get people to be able to lean on those relationships. So maybe you have a team of five people that work close together, and you need something from another team, and one person, well they play Halo together after dinner. And so it’s easy to have that conversation, to break through that ‘stranger barrier’ you get at scale.”

Finally, some last words of wisdom from Eric on the basics of creating a culture of experimentation:

Eric: “People listening in, you’re hearing a lot of cultural and practical tips that are applicable to the stage of company that these guys are at now, and I’m trying to throw in my two cents every once in a while based on companies that I’ve seen. But if you just go and you say, ‘Ok, I’ve learned that we should have a culture of experimentation,’ and you put up posters in your office saying, ‘Ok, everybody, starting today we’re going to have a culture of experimentation!’ You’ll have absolutely no impact whatsoever. One of the things I really believe in is something called the Startup Way, which is just a diagram that helps me remember how to invest in change from the bottom up rather than mandating it from the top down. And it goes like this: Accountability; Process; Culture; People – in that order. It’s the foundation of how we hold people accountable; determines what kind of [experiments] we can and can’t use, what kind of process and infrastructure we will or won’t invest in – obviously if you hold people accountable only for quick, short-term results, then if there’s no long-term philosophy then there’s no point ever in investing in long-term infrastructure, for example. But if you don’t make those process investments, if you don’t have a system for testing hypotheses, you’re never going to get a culture of experimentation and hypothesis-driven development. And if you have an old, Dilbert-styled culture, you’re never really going to be able to retain the best people for the long term.

“So when people say, ‘The solution to having a high-growth company is to hire good people,’ that’s true. When people say, ‘You have to have a culture of experimentation,’ also true. ‘You need to really invest in infrastructure and tools,’ yup, that’s correct. And when they say, ‘You need to hold people accountable, not to vanity metrics, but to learning milestones,’ yup, that’s true. All four of those things are the one thing you have to do to have a high-growth, successful company. It’s just that there’s more than one number-one high-priority thing, because each of those is an interlocking part of the system. You can’t really do one without the other, or if you try, God help you.”

–

Watch the rest of the webcast—and register for The Lean Startup Conference—for more specific information on all these topics. We sell conference tickets in blocks; when one block sells out, the price goes up. Register today for the best price possible.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Last week, we hosted a webcast conversation, Lean Startup for Growing Companies, with Eric Ries, Wyatt Jenkins of Shutterstock, and Ari Gesher of Palantir. The discussion focused on companies that have hit product-market fit and are growing fast—a topic for advanced entrepreneurs. But the information was critical for any early-stage company that hopes to reach that critical point and wants to be prepared when it comes. We’d like to share some highlights from the webcast and invite you to watch it in its entirety. There’s great information here about hiring, team structure, and best practices that will make you smarter.About Ari and Wyatt: Wyatt Jenkins is VP of Product at Shutterstock, a stock photo site founded in 2003 that now encompasses twelve cross-functional teams and is one of the world’s largest two-sided marketplaces. Ari Gesher is a senior engineer at Palantir Technologies, creating data-mining software for government and financial clients. Palantir, founded in 2004, had 15 employees when Ari started there; it now has 1,000 employees and $1B in contracts. Wyatt and Ari will both be speaking at The Lean Startup Conference in December.The first topic that came up is one that people in younger companies will want to know about—what’s hyper-growth actually like? What would it help to know about it before it happens?Ari: “Having been through hyper-growth or exponential growth, you hear about these other organizations that have been through that and you look at your Googles and your Facebooks and you sort of knew them when they were smaller, and you see them as these behemoths. And what you don’t realize is that there’s almost no graceful way to go through that kind of growth. …

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Wisdom from Hyper-growth Companies

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Social investment takes the stage: Five forums you should know about

When Thanh Truong, a dentist in Vietnam, wanted to help women in the Mekong Delta work their way out of poverty, she thought of quilting. With a small investment, Truong hired 35 women to begin producing the quilts, initially sold to friends. Now, 12 years later, Mekong Quilts has seven shops and employs over 340 women full time.Mekong Quilts is one of many examples of a successful social enterprise program. Around the world, businesses and organizations are applying investment strategies to improve human and environmental well-being and make a financial return.Several social investment forums brought social investment into the mainstream in 2013 and helped create and viable finance social investment and enterprise projects in Vietnam. At the Social Investment Forum in August in Hanoi, social investment experts discussed …

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When Thanh Truong, a dentist in Vietnam, wanted to help women in the Mekong Delta work their way out of poverty, she thought of quilting. With a small investment, Truong hired 35 women to begin producing the quilts, initially sold to friends. Now, 12 years later, Mekong Quilts has seven shops and employs over 340 women full time.

Mekong Quilts is one of many examples of a successful social enterprise program. Around the world, businesses and organizations are applying investment strategies to improve human and environmental well-being and make a financial return.

Several social investment forums brought social investment into the mainstream in 2013 and helped create and viable finance social investment and enterprise projects in Vietnam. At the Social Investment Forum in August in Hanoi, social investment experts discussed Vietnam’s potential and readiness for social investment, as well as ways to increase accessibility of social investment opportunities .

In 2012, there were 200 self-identified social enterprise organizations in Vietnam. But social investment totalled just $2 million, and another 165,000 organizations could become social enterprises, forum organizers said. The large gap between actual and potential social enterprises in Vietnam reflects the lack of legal structure for social enterprises, according to The Guardian. Organizations that could be considered social enterprises instead identify themselves as charities or simply as a business. The Social Investment Forum recommended creating a legal structure for social enterprises that would include tax relief for investors and policies that would incorporate and value social impact.

Other social investment forums held this year targeted Western investors, policy makers, philanthropists, and students to engage in the social investment movement. Here are four of the top annual forums to check out for next year:

• Finance for a Sustainable Future 2013, sponsored by the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investments last May in Chicago, connected investors, consultants, analysts and other financial professionals to research, education and leadership opportunities in sustainable investment. Speakers discussed new trends, approaches and policy developments in the field.


• Responsible Investment Forum 2013 was dedicated to reducing social inequalities and environmental damage.The London forum, hosted by Private Equity International in June, explored the impact that environmental, social and governance issues have on debt, and how private equity managers can navigate emerging markets while considering these issues.


• The Social Enterprise World Forum is hosted by a different country each year. The 2013 forum, earlier this month in Calgary, sought to bring representatives from all social enterprise sectors to launch the social enterprise movement into the mainstream. The topics ranged from innovation to systemic change, but the theme of the forum centered on community organization and empowerment. The forum spotlighted organizations such as the Okanagan Changemakers and Groupe Convex that exemplify this theme by promoting community involvement and meaningful employment.


• The theme for the Social Enterprise Summit 2013 in May in Minneapolis was “Building an Economy on Purpose,” reflecting the host’s belief that social enterprise is the most hopeful way to create successful global economies that serve the common good. The Summit brought together organizations to share success stories and learn from each other.

Thanh Truong proved that a vision and small financial expenditure could dramatically improve the quality of life of the women with whom she works. These international forums confirm that similar commitments made by businesses and organizations around the world would be beneficial to investors and communities alike.

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Social investment takes the stage: Five forums you should know about

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