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The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class

18/06/2013 10 min
The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class

Listen "The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class"

Episode Synopsis

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.
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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.

More episodes of the podcast Customer Development for Startups