The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come Victor Hugo The Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship curriculum has caught fire. This week 100 educators from around the world will come to Stanford to learn how to teach it. —– Life is full of unintended consequences. Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. I asked, “Is execution all there is to starting a company?” It dawned on me that the plans were a symptom of a larger problem: we wereexecuting business plans when we should first be searching for business models. We were putting the plan before the planning. So what would a search process for a business model look like? I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I calledCustomer Development. I wrote a book about this called the Four Steps to the Epiphany.