Nine Webcasts to Learn From

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well. Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on…

via Start Up:

Nine Webcasts to Learn From

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

Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well.

Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on-one conversation with Kent Beck about influencing other people; 2) Eric’s conversation with John Shook about the origins of Lean, and 3) a conversation between Diane Tavenner and Steven Hodas, moderated by Sarah Milstein, on applying Lean Startup ideas in education.

Eric’s chat with Kent Beck was among our most entertaining webcasts (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). Kent, a veteran programmer, a founder of the Agile method and the creator of Extreme Programming, came armed with anecdotes and lessons from his own experience, as well as a few questions for Eric. For example, at 12:56 in the video Kent describes how he made the move from programming to a role that he at one point describes as “Full Metal Guru”:

“It turns out you can be a bad enough programmer to sink a project, but you can’t be a good enough programmer to make a project successful. So I quickly ran out of gas on projects being more successful, and I was forced to take a bigger, broader view of the context in which programming happens. I started to pay attention to things that worked, and to things that didn’t seem to make a difference or actively harmed development. I’ve always been a contrarian, and so if someone says, ‘X is always true, I always think, then what are the implications of not-X?’ As a reflex, I always think that. So if someone says, ‘You need comprehensive documentation for software documentation,’ I think, ‘Well, what if you didn’t have any documentation at all? Would that really be a disaster?’ And I looked around at projects, and it wasn’t a disaster. So I thought, well, maybe a commitment to communication is good enough and the actual form of the communication is something we could be a little bit flexible on.”

The result of that kind of contrarian thinking was Extreme Programming, a method for running programming through feedback loops, testing and iterating on it as quickly as humanly possible. Nowadays Kent is programming again, this time at Facebook, which he describes: “It’s a laboratory. It’s really smart people working on unprecedented problems at ridiculous speed. So I get to see this hothouse of software design. I get to see generations of technology that last six months instead of lasting for six years. And so I can see many more cycles through the loop of how software evolves, how innovation disperses in a community, and so on.”

The enjoyment Eric and Kent shared in talking to one another comes through clearly in their conversation and led to an interesting exchange when Kent asked Eric how he had made the move from building things (programming) to an interest in influence in a broader sense. At 32:30, Eric offers this candid explanation:

“When I was younger I was convinced that programming was the most fun thing I would ever do and I’d be very happy to program increasingly large systems myself. And I think basically what happened was I kept doing that, and not having the impact I wanted to have. Because in my fantasy I could produce a massive program that’s used by billions of people and has enormous complexity and is incredibly innovative, by myself. Just, you know, with my bare hands. But the truth of any program is, it requires teams, and customers, and it’s this complicated ecosystem…. So the person who’s considered the ‘founder’ or the person who created the complicated system, it doesn’t matter if it’s Linux or Facebook or anything, somebody had to plant that initial seed, and that’s very satisfying.

“But in order for us to remember it and to care about the fact that they are the founder of that thing, they had to do an incredible amount of management of people to get them to grow that seed into something that is significant. And what’s frustrating to me–it was then and it still is–is that as soon as I became a manager and a team leader and an architect and really thinking out how to do that stuff, I was doing human systems engineering and I was no longer making things with my bare hands. And so I’ve also had that frustration. Now, that’s frustrating but also very satisfying, in that I’m very proud of the things that teams that I’ve worked with have built. But for me anyway, that transition from being a team leader to whatever it is that I do now, to try to cultivate this community and try to share these ideas on a wider scale–that was actually a much easier transition than going from an individual contributor to a team leader. Because to me, it’s like, as soon as I was not making things myself, with my bare hands, it’s all about, ok, then what activities will give me the greatest influence to have the impact I want to see in the world?”

The conversation also turned to a subject on everyone’s mind the last month or so–the healthcare.gov website. Kent’s analysis, which is largely political-process-driven, begins at 41:30. Eric offers a different account, seen through a Lean Startup lens:

“To me the great irony of healthcare.gov is that the current healthcare.gov that people are complaining about is actually the second version of healthcare.gov that was built. The first one was built right after the Obamacare law was passed…. And you couldn’t sign up for insurance in those days, it simply gave you information about the insurance options in your jurisdiction. But it was still pretty complicated, and it still required a lot of cooperation from the insurance companies–there was a lot to it. And they did it exactly opposite of this current healthcare.gov in the three dimensions I think of as key: they put a small team on it–a cross-functional small team, I think there was no more than 10 people; they gave them 90 days to deliver; and I think their total budget was so small as to be close enough to zero. Classic minimum viable product. They did it all open-source, so from an ethos point of view it was opposite, and from an infrastructure point of view it was all cloud and modern like you would expect. And they were able from that point to do the build-measure-learn thing and to iterate and get feedback from the insurance companies and from the public. And they turned that from a tiny little seed into a quite useful, complicated project by gradually increasing its complexity in a highly polarizing political environment where everybody wanted Obamacare to fail. Which is what to me is deeply frustrating–thanks to the president’s creation of the CIO and the CTO, he has really great people from Silicon Valley, from our communities, that could have been instrumental in creating this website, but those people were bypassed because of the IT procurement process in the federal government, which is a nightmare.”

For further highlights see Kent at 57:10 and Eric at 59:00 on the importance of measuring team members on impact rather than effort. Eric: “It’s a fundamental waste of human energy and talent to have people working on things that nobody wants and that have no impact. That’s actually morally wrong to have a system that does that. Couldn’t we expand our horizons and see that there’s actually another way? I find that very motivating.”

Eric’s conversation with John Shook, CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, covered the origins and applications of Lean principles (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). John moved to Japan in the 1980s to work at Toyota, which at that point had the most advanced manufacturing practices in the world. He took what he learned there back to the US, first to work with American auto plants as part of the GM-Toyota partnership, and then as the founder and president of the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Here’s John at 12:20 describing the turnaround Lean Manufacturing methods were able to make at Nummi, a GM plant that was, as he describes is, “the certified worst plant in the world,” both in terms of product quality and the attitude of the workforce:

“So I joined Toyota really exactly 30 years ago, it was late 1983. We built our first car there at Nummi in the old General Motors plant, in December 1984–so just one year. And with the same workforce–a lot of people don’t realize it was actually the same workforce, the old ‘troublemakers’ were offered their jobs back, and I worked alongside them–and in one year we built our first car. When GM did their first quality audit, it set the record for the very best quality score any GM plant had ever gotten. With the same workforce. And the same employees who were so disgruntled before became powerful advocates for the system, for this way of working. So the turnaround was powerful and in my mind at the time, this just proved that this could work, and this could work anywhere.”

To Eric, the scope of the turnaround is so unbelievable that it can be difficult to draw lessons for it for other companies. So he asked John how he had effected this incredible change in the culture at Nummi. John’s reply has the force of a new adage (at 16:44):

“We changed the way we behaved. That then changed the attitudes of the people that worked there, that brought forth a whole new culture…. Rather than think your way to a new way of acting, try to act your way to a new way of thinking. So how is it we want to think, ‘What’s the culture we want? Let’s try to draw a picture of that, and what do we need to do to get there?’ So we started working on the behaviors, what do we actually need to do? We changed the work.”

In response to a participant question about what you do if the problem isn’t the workers, rather the management, John said (at 26:48):

“It’s always the managers and not the workers, and we have to realize that. So if we are the managers, if we are the leaders, then we have to look in the mirror. That’s where it starts, that’s not where it ends. People often ask where do you start, do you start at the top, do you start at the middle, do you start at the front lines? And honestly, wherever you start, it’s going to be the other areas that are the problem, that have to be somehow brought along. And if you’re working with someone that’s a frontline manager or supervisor, they’ll often say, ‘Well, I could do this if I were one level higher up, because my bosses, those managers, they don’t get it, I get it.’ You go to them and they’ll say, ‘I get it, it’s one level higher up.’ You go all the way up to the CEO and the most frustrated person in the company is the CEO because he or she can’t get anything done that he or she wants done.”

Take a listen to John at 35:00 on what the company of the future will look like, and Eric’s closing question and anecdote at 39:43, a poignant narrative of waste centered around a visit he made to a factory floor and a revelation about his microwave.

Our final webcast of the season was organized in response to intense interest from our community around Lean Startup in education. We brought together Diane Tavenner, founder and president of Summit Public Schools, a network of charter schools in the San Francisco area, and Steven Hodas, who heads the markets initiative for NYC Department of Education, with Sarah Milstein, co-host of the Lean Startup Conference, for a webcast on Testing Lean Startup in Education (audio on iTunes and SoundCloud; we do not yet have the video for this webcast). The conversation centered around a few key topics: customers, bureaucracy, and MVP.

Diane at 5:13 describes her customers as students, but notes that their parents, the post-secondary education system (colleges and universities), employers, and even society at large are invested in students’ public education. Steven at 6:45 describes a useful distinction between customers, users and audiences, where these may be competing as well as overlapping interests. As he puts it, “Teasing out who is the customer is part of the work itself.” In response to a question about the bureaucratic and regulatory barriers to action–barriers that, given the intensity of personal and public interest in education one would expect to be quite high–both Diane and Steven surprisingly agreed that there was more excuse-making than actual obstacles to action (start at 12:18 for this portion of the conversation).

The practical how-tos of running experiments on actual students in an education environment was a major feature of this webcast. Here’s Diane (at 18:30) on the relationship between getting buy-in and creating an MVP, where the two can serve each other:

“Really the key concept here is that to win people over, you have to identify a problem that is particularly challenging for them, or even a small problem for that matter, and then demonstrate that using these processes actually solves that and gets them to a place that’s much more desirable. And one very exciting example for us, an early example and an easy win, was our teachers really needed a way to differentiate and personalize instruction for students, because when you’ve got 25 students and they’re all in different places, how do you meet their individual needs? It’s humanly impossible. And so they came to this idea if we had a playlist for kids that was really intuitive for them, that we could curate all these different resources so that kids could actually choose how they learn best. And if we could collaborate as teachers across different schools and across subject areas in courses, it would be helpful. So taking that wish and seeing that it doesn’t exist out there, we partnered with a software company, shared this wish and ultimately ended up co-developing, co-designing and building an MVP, testing it, involving our teachers and students all along the way, and ultimately this fall launching it as a free product that’s available to every teacher in the world, where they can collaborate and share and use it with their students.”

As a counterpart to the question of how to create and test an MVP, Steven and Diane discussed how to use metrics to measure progress. Steven at this point (34;28) launched a defense of vanity metrics– not to measure student progress, but to help create, again, buy-in from stakeholders:

“Given the public nature of public schooling, and the tremendous political pressure, and this fear of failure that Diane mentioned, which is really ubiquitous and the higher up in the organization you go the worse it gets–in order to get collaborators to come along with you, you need to make them feel good. By focusing on things that matter to them. Not only do you need to identify problems that are important to them, but they’re looking for certain indicators of success that may not overlap with your indicators of success. And so depending on the situation and what it is you’re trying to accomplish, for example, a certain number of newspaper headlines that speak positively about the work can be far more important, for better or for worse, in getting you the buy-in to take you to the next step than some increase in student achievement on a formative assessment. Because those particular people who [are] your audience, who you’re trying to impress at the central level, their concerns are not immediately about student achievement at that moment. It’s about what does this mean for me, and my career, and what is the potential downside, how is my boss going to feel about it. So when I think of vanity metrics I think of things that can be bad because they can be deceiving when you apply them to yourself.

“But I think things that demonstrate popularity–again, in a politicized context–are really important, so we do rely on them. When we do software challenges, for example, participation in those challenges is a really important metric, in fact it’s one of the things we optimize for. And I’m not embarrassed to say that sometimes we’ll optimize more for participation than for the quality of the software that comes out the other end. Because at that stage in our MVP what we’re trying to demonstrate is not that our software challenge produces the silver bullet that’s going to solve all our middle school math problems, but that if we have an open, embracing process, new partners will want to come participate with us.”

–

All of our webcast speakers will be at The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11. Register today to join them and dozens of other speakers, as we explore advanced topics in entrepreneurship.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well.Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on-one conversation with Kent Beck about influencing other people; 2) Eric’s conversation with John Shook about the origins of Lean, and 3) a conversation between Diane Tavenner and Steven Hodas, moderated by Sarah Milstein, on applying Lean Startup ideas in education.Eric’s chat with Kent Beck was among our most entertaining webcasts (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). Kent, a veteran programmer, a founder of the Agile method and the creator of Extreme Programming, came armed with anecdotes and lessons from his own experience, as well as a few questions for Eric. For example, at 12:56 in the video Kent describes how he made the move from programming to a role that he at one point describes as “Full Metal Guru”:“It turns out you can be a bad enough programmer to sink a project, but you can’t be a good enough programmer to make a project successful. So I quickly ran out of gas on projects being more successful, and I was forced to take a bigger, broader view of the context in which programming happens. I started to pay attention to things that worked, and to things that didn’t seem to make a difference or actively harmed development. I’ve always been a contrarian, and so if someone says, ‘X is always true, I always think, then what are the implications of not-X?’ As a reflex, I always think that. So if someone says, ‘You need comprehensive documentation for software documentation,’ I think, ‘Well, what if you didn’t have any documentation at all? …

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Nine Webcasts to Learn From

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Nine Webcasts to Learn From

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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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Courting Content, Not Controversy

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3 Free Online Learning Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

3 Free Online Learning Opportunities for EntrepreneursNov 19th, 2013 · 0 Comment3 Free Online Learning Opportunities for Entrepreneurs There are many, many online learning opportunities for entrepreneurs. But, just sifting through all the possibilities could give even the most determined entrepreneur a massive headache.So, instead of 100 places online to learn about starting a business, here are three free resources that I’ve stumbled upon over the past couple of weeks, that offer an encompassing, quality educational experience for new business owners.The key to online learning in general is getting the right foundations in place at the beginning. Once you know the fundamentals, it will be much easier to pin point those areas where you need further development. These three resources will get you started in the right direction.1. How…

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3 Free Online Learning Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

There are many, many online learning opportunities for entrepreneurs. But, just sifting through all the possibilities could give even the most determined entrepreneur a massive headache.So, instead of 100 places online to learn about starting a business, here are three free resources that I’ve stumbled upon over the past couple of weeks, that offer an encompassing, quality educational experience for new business owners.The key to online learning in general is getting the right foundations in place at the beginning. Once you know the fundamentals, it will be much easier to pin point those areas where you need further development. These three resources will get you started in the right direction.1. How to Build a Startup by Steve Blank. If you are just starting up a business …

via FastUpFront Small Business Blog:

There are many, many online learning opportunities for entrepreneurs. But, just sifting through all the possibilities could give even the most determined entrepreneur a massive headache. So, instead of 100 places online to learn about starting a business, here are three free resources that I’ve stumbled upon over the past couple of weeks, that offer [...]

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FastUpFront Small Business Blog

3 Free Online Learning Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

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Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group. Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away…

via Start Up:

Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

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

We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group.

Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away, can be hard to swing. To ease the financial load, we’ve got a scholarship program that strips away luxuries and offers you a ticket that’s under-cost for us.

We’re interested not only in bringing folks to San Francisco, but also in helping Lean Startup communities take root beyond Silicon Valley. So on the partially-validated theory that Lean Startup methodologies will thrive most readily in areas where people can support each other, we’re giving priority to groups. Individuals can apply, but the scholarship application form is designed for a community leader to bring in a group from a geographic area or from an incubator/accelerator program. There’s no group size requirement per se, but we’ll look for a bigger group from say, New York City, than from a region with a smaller existing Lean Startup community. There’s also no deadline for applicants, but we’ll let people in on a rolling basis, and we anticipate running out of spots well before the conference, so apply now.

If you live outside the San Francisco Bay Area, and you’re simply unable to consider travel, you can apply to host a free livestream of the conference in your town. Last year, we had 300 livestream groups worldwide.

Non-profit staff and volunteers. This year’s Lean Startup Conference has a number of talks on Lean Impact—the movement to apply Lean Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations. For small and minimally funded non-profit organizations who could benefit greatly from participating in these sessions but can’t afford the conference fee, we have a special scholarship program.

Students. Students, particularly undergraduates, are some of the most open-minded and avidly interested people in our orbit. They’re also some of the least able to afford registration. The good news is that The Lean Startup Conference relies on top-notch volunteers to keep our events running smoothly, and we’ve found that students often make the best volunteers. We take the volunteering commitment very seriously, so please apply only if you’re able to offer us both time and friendly dedication. The deadline for applying to volunteer is this Friday, November 8 (that’s three days from now!).

This is the first year we’ve offered the scholarship program, which means we can’t yet tell you what the experience of coming to the conference on scholarship is like. But we did have volunteers last year, one of whom, Sourabh Chakraborty, is returning this year as a scholarship program participant. Sourabh is a college student deeply engaged with entrepreneurship issues, but located outside the usual tech geographic nexus. We wrote to him to ask him about his experience at last year’s Lean Startup Conference, and what he hopes to learn this year.

LSC: You were a volunteer last year at the Lean Startup Conference. Can you give a little intro to how you came to Lean Startup—what you do, what interested you about the conference, and how those two things are connected?

Sourabh: I’m a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and part of the local community of entrepreneurs and startup folks in Lincoln and Nebraska. I’ve tried a few ideas of my own in the past, and tried to help my friends with their ideas. I was under this impression that because I could code and build something, I could solve a problem. But every time we started, whether it was my idea or my friends’ ideas, we would keep getting struck with this intangible smack at the beginning — What is or isn’t our solution? Does anybody really want it? How will we decide pricing? Didn’t Steve Jobs say that customers don’t know what they want…? So I guess we should build what we as entrepreneurs and ideators think is right. Why is it taking so long to get something out of the door? Oh, right, we have an impossible list of features that will take months to build.” And that’s all not to mention the hours and hours we spent at the coffee shop discussing equity. Boy, did we all put up a hard fight in our heads for those dreamy millions!

This repeated frustration forced me to look at other processes, and I came across some material from Steve Blank’s book The Startup Owner’s Manual, and his Udacity course, How to Build a Startup. Very soon I was doing Business Model Canvases for everything (of course, I hadn’t even read the entire book yet). That process lasted a few months before I got frustrated that it also wasn’t helping. After reading the first few chapters of Eric’s book, The Lean Startup, and investigating some other blogs and listening to other people’s processes, it slowly dawned on me what Lean meant and what Steve Blank and Eric Ries were talking about—and how common-sensical it was.

Following Lean Startup stuff online, I came across the Lean Startup Conference. Because I’m a student, I emailed the organizers to see if there was any way I could attend by volunteering. I learn best through osmosis and asking questions, so putting myself amidst other Lean Startup entrepreneurs would, I thought, be an incredible opportunity for me to get better at my process.



LSC: What role does Lean Startup play in your work now, post-conference—both in terms of approach and practice?

Sourabh: I’m exploring concepts like starting with the riskiest assumption, rapid prototyping and testing our assumptions by getting feedback, and then iterating our solution. Through our university’s student group we built software products for a couple of startups in the summer, and we advised our clients based on these principles. We’ve also been adopting this with our other creative clients, like, for example, the advertising campaign we are working on.

Personally this process has been a relief, because the focus has turned from, “How successful was our solution?” to “How much did we learn from the last iteration?”—and getting that pressure off our shoulders has been incredible. Now we can fearlessly go back to square one if we have to, even if much work has been invested, because nobody is to blame. We just move on as quickly as we can to the next iteration/experiment.

I should say that I still feel I understand only some principles of Lean Startup—I haven’t gotten into Lean Analytics and Build-Measure-Learn yet, which is part of why I’m so glad to be coming to the conference again this year. I’m still in the beginning stages.



LSC: What do you think was the most valuable thing you learned at last year’s conference? Did you have an experience with particular impact at the conference, or meet someone you otherwise would not have?

Sourabh: I learned how widespread the Lean Startup concept was among the entrepreneurs who were at the conference, and what I needed to bring these principles to my friends back in Lincoln and at my university. After attending the conference the first time, my answer to most things in life has become “I don’t know, but I’ve got a hypothesis, and let’s find out if its right.”

In terms of the talks, the most eye-opening experience was right towards the end when the winner of the Lean Startup Machine [Mark Abramson] talked about their team’s process of pivoting two or three times over a weekend as they discovered new insights. Another very memorable talk came from Barath Kadaba, speaking as part of Scott Cook’s Intuit Panel, who described conducting an experiment in India to try and help Indian farmers judge the market for their goods by sending them a daily SMS with personalized agricultural information. As an Indian student, I was happy to see problem-solvers using Lean Startup principles in my country and getting amazing results. This is especially impressive since it’s so hard to understand the context of the customer in India, because of the differences in social structure, class and culture between the problem-solvers and the customers.

Of course, meeting people was the biggest thing, and the serendipitous meetings were the best. The volunteer staff, some local startup folks, old friends, a random startup guy in my dorm room who’s in his eighties—all that was just amazing.



LSC: Anything else you’d like to say about Lean Startup, its value for your work, or the experience of going to the conference?

Sourabh: The only thing I can think of for any student or entrepreneur who is trying out different strategies to start a startup and is struggling at the ideation stage is—give these principles a shot. And The Lean Startup Conference really is the best place to get started, because you’ll meet hundreds of people who’ve done it before, and tens of people who are taking the first steps, just like you. The Lean Startup Conference is the safest place to fail.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group.Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away, can be hard to swing. To ease the financial load, we’ve got a scholarship program that strips away luxuries and offers you a ticket that’s under-cost for us.We’re interested not only in bringing folks to San Francisco, but also in helping Lean Startup communities take root beyond Silicon Valley. So on the partially-validated theory that Lean Startup methodologies will thrive most readily in areas where people can support each other, we’re giving priority to groups. Individuals can apply, but the scholarship application form is designed for a community leader to bring in a group from a geographic area or from an incubator/accelerator program. There’s no group size requirement per se, but we’ll look for a bigger group from say, New York City, than from a region with a smaller existing Lean Startup community. …

For more info: Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

Lessons Learned

Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

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A Different Kind of Entrepreneurship Conference

This post was co-written by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. We’ve just published the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 9 to 11 in San Francisco, and we can say without hesitation that it’s completely unlike any other entrepreneurship conference in existence. The difference matters, because while there are more than enough conferences aimed at startups—more of them every year it seems—so many of them look the same: a succession of speakers who are on the conference circuit, and a series of fast pitches and demos from early-stage startups. But entrepreneurs who are leading fast-growing companies or who are working in environments beyond Silicon Valley need more. They need deeper information on advanced entrepreneurship topics. So we’re…

via Start Up:

A Different Kind of Entrepreneurship Conference

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

We’ve just published the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 9 to 11 in San Francisco, and we can say without hesitation that it’s completely unlike any other entrepreneurship conference in existence. The difference matters, because while there are more than enough conferences aimed at startups—more of them every year it seems—so many of them look the same: a succession of speakers who are on the conference circuit, and a series of fast pitches and demos from early-stage startups. But entrepreneurs who are leading fast-growing companies or who are working in environments beyond Silicon Valley need more. They need deeper information on advanced entrepreneurship topics. So we’re covering important issues no one else talks about, and we’ve found terrific speakers you won’t see at other entrepreneurship conferences. Below, we’ll talk about how we chose our speakers in ways that will make the composition of the event simply unlike any other tech or even business conference, and how you can get tickets at a great price.

When our event started four years ago, we focused on bringing entrepreneurs together to talk about getting started with the Lean Startup methodology, which creates a broad framework for reducing the uncertainty inherent in a startup. (The Lean Startup helps companies reduce risk by formulating and testing hypotheses rather than making massive up-front investments, and by constantly iterating based on evidence gained via testing.) We’ve always put the focus of the conference on people who are actually implementing this methodology and what they’re learning in the field. But as the community of Lean Startup practitioners has matured, so has our event.

The conference is still designed to help entrepreneurs learn from each other. But we now have a much bigger pool of experienced people to draw from—and we’ve taken the time to find folks from many kinds of companies, in a range of sectors, with new kinds of stories and advice that other entrepreneurs can benefit from. So now, in addition to helping people implement Lean Startup ideas for the first time, we also have sessions on the following topics, which we’ve highlighted with a few talk examples; the conference itself features many more speakers:

Leading hyper-growth. Ari Gesher of Palantir will talk about preserving a culture of learning and experimentation within a company that has had skyrocketing growth. Kent Beck of Facebook will give a talk and lead a discussion on how engineers in particular can simultaneously experiment and execute in companies that have enough success they now need to do both. Valerie Gofman will show you how Sharethrough has used Lean Startup methods throughout a growth process that has taken it well beyond an early-stage startup.

The fine art of experimentation. We’ll look hard at experimentation and how to do it better. Brian Frezza will talk about how Emerald Therapeutics is experimenting with a platform for scientific, well, experimentation. Diane Tavenner of Summit Public Schools will explain how she’s institutionalizing innovation after having early successes with experimentation (in an usual setting, to boot). Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic/WordPress, will talk about the way his company experiments constantly—even though his teams are fully distributed, with nearly everyone working from home.

Seriously leveling up tactics like A/B testing. Wyatt Jenkins will reveal the next-level approach Shutterstock takes to A/B testing. Mariya Yao has thoroughly practical advice for rapidly iterating mobile designs. Laura Klein will take you beyond landing pages and show you other key methods for testing ideas.

Understanding and applying the economic theories that make Lean Startup truly work. If you’ve already taken your Lean Startup practice to the level where understanding the economic theory behind it will give you an edge, we’ve got speakers like Don Reinertsen on understanding and using cost of delay; Dan Milstein on making better decisions by taking into account risk, information, time and money; and John Shook on the history of lean manufacturing and its implications for today’s companies.

The human factors that make Lean Startup actually work in practice at any company. A few examples among many: Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic/WordPress, will talk about his company runs experiments all the time—even though his teams are fully distributed, with nearly everyone working from home. John Goulah will show you how Etsy gets engineers on board with continuous deployment, an important technical environment that many resist. Cindy Alvarez and Ethan Gur-esh will discuss their process in helping Microsoft teams transition into using Lean Startup methods. Trevor Owens of Lean Startup Machine will talk about how you can overcome biases to make sure you’re experiments are valid.

How some of the largest companies in the world innovate. One of the fastest-growing segments of the Lean Startup community comprises large, established companies—many operating in regulated environments. Speakers from companies like Intuit, Comcast, Optum, Microsoft and Toyota will talk about making Lean Startup work in complex organizations.

Lean Startup for mission-driven organizations. Lean Impact—the movement bringing Lean Startup ideas to non-profit and mission-driven organizations—is burgeoning. Speakers from organizations like Kiva, LearnUp, Black Girls Code and the New York City Department of Education will talk about everything from funding risk to bureaucratic risk. Nearly all of their lessons will be useful to people working in the for-profit sector, too.

Getting started with Lean Startup. Naturally, we’ll have a number of talks for early-stage companies, like The Muse’s Kathryn Minshew on acquiring your first users out of thin air, or Robin Chase’s story of how she started Zipcar—and how you can start the next company to rival it. But in many cases, we have parallel talks for advanced entrepreneurs. For instance, Usha Viswanathan will talk about keeping your senior executives close to your customers as you grow. And Catherine Bracy of Code for America will look at expanding Lean Startup methods from one project to a whole, established organization.

When it comes to speakers well-known in entrepreneurship communities, we’ve focused on bringing those with on-the-ground perspectives highly useful to businesspeople of all kinds: Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Reid Hoffman, Steve Blank. Many of the best-known speakers in the Lean Startup community—experts like Janice Fraser, Ash Maurya, Brant Cooper and Alistair Croll—will be giving hands-on workshops on December 11. Those sessions are designed for attendees seeking an even greater level of practical advice that you can you put to work right away; they’re available to anyone who registers for a Gold or VIP pass. And, because we had so many good speaking candidates this year, we added a night of Ignite talks open to all conference attendees.

Last, and perhaps most important, we don’t follow the standard application process for conference presenters. Startup conferences are notoriously white and male, both in terms of speakers and attendees. In its first two years, The Lean Startup Conference was, too. But last year, when Sarah joined the conference as co-host, we decided to rethink how we were finding speakers. We began to create a more broadly merit-based approach, rather than employing the system that most conferences do, which relies on inviting people you already know or know of. We wrote last year about what we did and how our efforts took us from a conference with a speaker roster of almost entirely young, white, male speakers whom Eric knew personally to one featuring 40% women, 25% people of color, and many people we didn’t already know—while maintaining a very high level of attendee satisfaction. In other words, reaching out beyond our immediate networks helped us find great speakers we simply hadn’t been aware of previously. We’ve done the same this year, and that means we can bring you stories and advice from entrepreneurs who have incredible insights to share, whom you won’t hear from elsewhere.

Our speaker roster now better reflects our community. But what about our attendee base? To help ensure that people with a range of means can attend, we have two scholarship programs. To make sure that anyone who comes to the conference has a safe, respectful and professional experience among peers, we have a code of conduct that we enforce, and we’ll offer a number of ways for attendees and speakers to meet each other that don’t focus on drinking.

We think it’s pretty clear looking at all of this that Lean Startup is not like your average entrepreneurship conference at any level. Nor do we intend it to be. Register today to join us and get the best price possible. We sell tickets in blocks, and when one block sells out, the price goes up. The current block is already almost sold out, so register now. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone December 9 through 11 and hearing your feedback. Register today!

via Lessons Learned:

This post was co-written by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.We’ve just published the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference, December 9 to 11 in San Francisco, and we can say without hesitation that it’s completely unlike any other entrepreneurship conference in existence. The difference matters, because while there are more than enough conferences aimed at startups—more of them every year it seems—so many of them look the same: a succession of speakers who are on the conference circuit, and a series of fast pitches and demos from early-stage startups. But entrepreneurs who are leading fast-growing companies or who are working in environments beyond Silicon Valley need more. They need deeper information on advanced entrepreneurship topics. So we’re covering important issues no one else talks about, and we’ve found terrific speakers you won’t see at other entrepreneurship conferences. Below, we’ll talk about how we chose our speakers in ways that will make the composition of the event simply unlike any other tech or even business conference, and how you can get tickets at a great price.When our event started four years ago, we focused on bringing entrepreneurs together to talk about getting started with the Lean Startup methodology, which creates a broad framework for reducing the uncertainty inherent in a startup. (The Lean Startup helps companies reduce risk by formulating and testing hypotheses rather than making massive up-front investments, and by constantly iterating based on evidence gained via testing.) We’ve always put the focus of the conference on people who are actually implementing this methodology and what they’re learning in the field. But as the community of Lean Startup practitioners has matured, so has our event.The conference is still designed to help entrepreneurs learn from each other. But we now have a much bigger pool of experienced people to draw from—and we’ve taken the time to find folks from many kinds of companies, in a range of sectors, with new kinds of stories and advice that other entrepreneurs can benefit from. So now, in addition to helping people implement Lean Startup ideas for the first time, we also have sessions on the following topics, which we’ve highlighted with a few talk examples; the conference itself features many more speakers:Leading hyper-growth. …

For more info: A Different Kind of Entrepreneurship Conference

Lessons Learned

A Different Kind of Entrepreneurship Conference

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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

Lessons Learned

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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