Basel: Let's talk about the Lean Launch Pad. How has that been so far, and if you have any plans for going global with it?
Steve: So, the Lean Launch Pad is a class that I first taught at Stanford University in the engineering school. It has now been adopted by UC Berkeley Business School as well as the Columbia Business School, and then in 2011 was adopted by the U.S. National Science Foundation to teach scientists and engineers.
What it really is, is simply a class that takes students, forms them in teams and from day one has them constructing a business model, a business model diagram, building their product in the class, whether it's hardware or software, and then getting out of the building and marching through, who are our customers; can we create demand; what's the channel, etc?
If you're building a web-based product, the goal is in eight weeks to get orders. The record so far is - I have had a consumer products company get a million and a half dollars in orders in the middle of the class.
Basel: Wow. That's phenomenal.
Steve: And the last class that just finished, 21 hard core science and engineering teams, making graphene and chlorine sensors, real science and engineering. We would have been happy if three out of the 21 teams would decide to move forward as a company. We were kind of stunned and a little embarrassed that 19 out of the 21 have decided to continue forward to get funding and become entrepreneurs.
In this case, they weren't 21-year-old software web people. They were, average age was 46-year-old full professors at universities. So, I think we might have discovered a process that's pretty exciting.
Basel: Absolutely. That's got a great potential overseas as well.
Steve: I think so, too. There's nothing U.S. centric about the process. The only thin that U.S. and Silicon Valley centric is what we have in the Silicon Valley, which is now actually more of a state of mind than it is what we physically do here. It's the peninsula that extends south from San Francisco to a city called San Jose. Our key industry now is now web or hardware or anything. What we do best here is just innovation and entrepreneurship, I mean, just in general because what we know how to do here…
Do you know what we call a failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley? It's a special name. Do you know what we call them? Experienced. That's unique in this cluster. It's even unique in the United States. We don't call them failures. We call them experienced, and so the only limitation in expanding entrepreneurship overseas is one, is there a culture that accepts that failure equals experience. Two is, is there a culture that's willing to adopt commercially new technologies, and are there markets sufficient to support it? If those two conditions exist, then you have the beginning of something exciting.
About the Guest:
After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, Steve retired in 1999. He co-founded his last company, E.piphany, in his living room in 1996.His other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.
After Steve retired, He took some time to reflect on his experience and wrote a book about building early stage companies called "Four Steps to the Epiphany". His latest book, The Startup Owners Manual integrates 10 years of new knowledge.
Steve moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program.
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Lean Launch Pad
Steve Blank talks about one of his initiatives to help entrepreneurs start their businesses, the initiative is called "Lean Launch Pad".
