Steve Franks – Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Steve Jobs resigned from the CEO role at Apple yesterday.  I didn’t know him, but his work intersected with my life multiple times.

1. My first computer was a red book Apple II.  No monitor, no disk drive.  TV and cassette.  It was how I first learned to program.
2. I made my living for a bit selling Apple (and other) computers.  My largest dollar sale was an Apple II sale to a school system.
3. During the Macintosh launch I was one of the retail salespeople who had the opportunity to buy one for 1/3 retail.  Yes, I bought one.  That was also the same time when I met one of the original Apple haters, a professor who loved Wordstar (look it up) and said, “Harrumph, if its software doesn’t use control codes, it’s not a real computer.”
4. Some years later, Apple contracted the innovation consultancy I would later join to do a pre-launch 3rd party verification of the original Powerbook’s competitive advantage.  As you would guess, the study confirmed that the Powerbook would hold its market price (that was in the days where laptops were released for $3,495 retail but after a few weeks were selling for $995 street price).   Yes, the Powerbook did indeed hold its price, while nearly all other laptop prices disintegrated (we know because we went back a year later and mapped the price data versus our prediction).  We used the results of that study to highlight the predictive power of our innovation model.  In fact, it is still used – you can read it here: http://pvmspec.com/success_stories.html.
5. Today I am on my fourth Macbook and use an iPhone.  I have passed on one Macbook and two iPods to my best friend’s family.

Thank you Steve J – from Steve F

There were a bunch of great speakers at Momentum’s Lean Startup Michigan Conference last week in Grand Rapids.

Here is a fairly random collection of the ideas I took away.

Eric Ries

Eric, one of the gurus of Lean Startup, kicked off the conference with a great talk.

1. Entrepreneurship is management, where the unit of measure is validated learning.
2. The cycle is: build-measure-learn (then rinse and repeat).  You want to minimize total time through this loop: ideas, build code, measure data, learn, repeat.
3. A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product under conditions of extreme uncertainty.  A startup is an experiment
4. Planning and forecasts (ala business plans) work only when you have a long and stable history to draw upon.
5. All successful startups have in common that they have pivoted – changed strategy – without changing the vision of where they wanted to go.  Pivot = change direction but stay grounded in what we know.
6. Reducing the time between pivots increases odds of a venture’s success, before it runs out of money.  Runway should be measured by the number of pivots that the funds allow to be performed, not just the payroll/expense time.
7. The waterfall method of design doesn’t work becasue – you can be on time, under budget, high quality, beautiful design – but still successfully be executing a fatally flawed plan.
8. what is the minimum effort that can be expended to learn what the specification should be (what the customer wants) – NOT to execute the specification (that we don’t know yet is right).
9. Eric suggests we do “innovation accounting”.  1. Establish the baseline, build mvp and measure how customers behave right now.   2. Tune the engine, experiment to see if we can improve metrics from the  baseline to the ideal.  3. Pivot or persevere.  When your experiments reach diminishing returns, it’s time to pivot.
10. If you don’t know who the customer is, you don’t know what quality means.

Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits

My apologies to Brant and Patrick for boiling down a good talk into one priceless takeaway.

1. The “Old Yeller Award”.   Who can kill their bad concept the fastest?  Take it out behind the barn and shoot that thing!

To make it up to them, let me urge you to go buy their book, The Entrepreneur´s Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups – the Cliffs Notes for Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Rob Walling

Rob, the author of Start Small, Stay Small:  A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup, likes small, bootstrapped ventures.  He knows this because he has taken his own advice:

1. Know yourself.

Rob likes Strengths Finder 2.0, a book that will help you find out how you are wired.

Dan Martel

1. Tell your stories like this: feature x will affect metric y.
2. Use metrics for weekly cohorts of users.  Metris have got to be getting better – or something is wrong.
3. If users activate but don’t come back to your site and actually use, then something is wrong – you are not solving a problem worthy of their coming back.
4. Traction = activation and retention.
5. Use activity streams: log, time stamp, and color code (cool idea!) the actions users are using in your app.

William Pietri

1. Three kinds of code:  1. temporary, 2. sustainable, 3. half-assed (temporary code shipped, etc.).
2. Temporary code is hard to throw away, but you have to throw it out and go make something proper.
3. Code for quality and maintainability – automate your tests
4. Try pair programming – 2 people, 1 computer – it sounds weird, but it is very useful.  Hint – programming is more about thinking than typing.

Jeffrey Schox (patent attorney)

1. Provisionals are not searchable – if you abandon it, it can’t be found.
2. You can create a provisional patent application in a day for $110 – file early and file often.
3. Too general a concept = not patentable.  Too specific a product = not valuable.   In the middle = the sweet spot.
4. Minimum Viable Patent strategy:  1.  Before seed: ($10K) file a provisional application and conduct a preliminary freedom to operate analysis on your main competitors.  2.  Before Series A: file a full patent application and conduct a preliminary freedom to operate analysis on all relevant patents.

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the Lean Startup Michigan conference in Grand Rapids.

At lunch the organizers set out box lunches.  We could choose from several different kinds of sandwiches.  I got out there late, and here is what I found.

Can you identify which meal was not popular (the value proposition hypothesis that failed) – and those that were popular (the hypotheses that were confirmed)?

p.s. for what it’s worth, ham didn’t cut it with the Lean Startup crowd.