Be Bold

I can show you pictures, tell you stories, and walk you through the process (and I will!) but most importantly, I gained two key insights:

1. Entrepreneurship is chaos – experience it yourself!
2. Lean Startup is a mindset, not a formula

Why experience the chaos? It feels different – completely different – when you are in the moment. Last week, I read The Lean Startup and immediately, I thought it clicked. Yet I could not fully understand it until I applied the tools. For example, in our final presentations, Trevor forced us to summarize the weekend in this table:

Presented like this, the experiments and decisions seem obvious and logical. Yet when we were working through it, it was incredibly chaotic… we conducted experiments that ended up testing something completely unrelated, we had countless extra conversations, and frankly, we spun our wheels. By creating the table, we suddenly discovered that we had wasted a lot of effort. The waste was everything that didn’t fit on the table.

In other words, when I tell you experience the chaos yourself, I mean: Entrepreneurship is hard!

The Lean Startup mindset empowers you to order the chaos. Throughout the weekend, we were iterating on the business concept itself, progressively moving through our fundamental hypotheses on customers, problems, and solutions. We learned a ton, but in the big picture of a business, we hardly scratched the surface – we were still developing our basic concept!

Yet this weekend taught me that the Lean Startup is a mindset. When I was reading, I thought that Eric Ries was providing existing businesses with a formulaic framework rooted in concepts like the engine of growth and value hypothesis. Wrong. Those two concepts are the results of applying the mindset to a particular situation – an existing business. But that mindset can be applied to nearly anything, including a vague idea aspiring to become a business.

Lastly, I’m very glad that we focused so exclusively on our customer (international students looking for jobs). Since we had no idea what their precise challenges were, and therefore couldn’t begin to imagine solutions for them, our entire process was liberated. We went into interviews and experiments with no biases. We just learned.

Another day, I’ll document the play-by-play of how our team worked through RememberMe (remembering crucial details about people) and InterLink (helping talented international students find full-time jobs in the US). While the main outcome of the weekend was learning the Lean Startup method of thinking, it also empowered us to gain a lot of insight on topics I care about.

Remember the idea I was so excited about yesterday? Yeah, we abandoned it.

Luckily, we had the fun distraction of meeting Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, as we were debating new alternatives. His talk was packed with quotable moments like defining vision by asking, “What are the things I am so committed to that I’d rather see the company fail than violate these commitments?” Of course, he was equally clear in saying that the real gems of the Lean Startup methodology aren’t cool slogans – they are the nuanced details that require real, critical thinking.

But back to business.

We settled on a new idea: helping international students find jobs after graduation. Almost immediately, after just a few conversations, we were convinced that we had discovered a much more “painful” problem. We were hearing lengthy explanations of the complexity of their challenges, and even long rants on the struggles of recruiting for international students. Not everyone had the same degree of pain, of course, but every single interviewee converged on a single challenge: inability to reliably determine which companies are willing to sponsor international students’ H1B visas. Every single person said, unprompted, that they wished they had a list or database with that information. We had validated the problem and the customer (international students without green cards seeking jobs outside of investment banking, accounting, and top-tier consulting).

The next step is “solution testing,” i.e. brainstorming solutions and rigorously testing the assumptions underlying those solutions. We are already in the process, but it has been incredibly exciting. Armed with a good baseline of information – the foundation of what LSM mentor Jason Evanish likes to call the “MVP House” (MVP means minimum viable product) – I can see how rapid iteration can form the rest.

Most importantly, this single day – plus reading The Lean Startup – has transformed the way I think about startups. For example, I suddenly get…

• …why you must actually talk to people… immediately. Between our first and second ideas, our conversations with potential customers completely changed – and showed that the international students had a burning need, whereas people managing relationships were casual about the problem.
• …how difficult it is to be disciplined in experimentation. Who wants to “slow down” and lay out the assumptions to be tested? Yet I’ve realized that assumptions that sneak in are incredibly dangerous – and huge time-wasters.
• …why accelerators/incubators focus on mentorship. I cannot even count the number of times a mentor walked in and just rocked our world. Their insights have saved us hours of work. It’s unreal.
• …that entrepreneurship and startups are addicting. Working from 9am to 11pm feels like nothing. I am literally energized and engaged for the entire time. Honestly, I wish I could do this every weekend and  refine my skills – which, coincidentally, is what my teammate Nate is doing.

Lean Startup Machine has already given me more than I could have imagined. I cannot wait to see what amazing new lessons tomorrow brings.

I am CEO of a lean startup around remembering the critical details of your relationships.

At least, I am for the weekend at Lean Startup Machine. Founded by Trevor Owens, LSM is a phenomenal new program that forces entrepreneurs to apply the powerful methodology of The Lean Startup in an action-packed weekend. It’s like Startup Weekend, plus passionate mentors and a game-changing framework for entrepreneurship.

It’s been insane so far. First off, I thought my idea would be too obscure… yet it was one of the most popular ones. For a while, there were going to be two teams pursuing my idea (though the other team eventually changed their minds).  Now, I’m working with three other great entrepreneurs – Patrick, Praveen, and Nate – to turn this into a viable business with real customers.

The mentors have been incredible. The way they think – and the way they move through LSM’s “Validation Canvas” – is just mind-blowing. During every conversation, we’ve been learning more and more. And I can’t say enough about my team as well. Everyone has been contributing so much enthusiasm, originality, and critical thinking. I have never experienced anything like it.

Lastly, if you’d like to learn my initial idea, here was my pitch, more or less:

This weekend, you’ll meet 50 great entrepreneurs. But in a year, how much will you remember?

Let’s say you and I get coffee. Professionally, do you remember that even though my LinkedIn says Goldman Sachs, my passion is business development for consumer web? And you probably wouldn’t remember that personal story I told you about my brother. Yet that’s the information that truly matters.

I’m proposing a relationship management tool that will help you remember and organize the critical details of the relationships you care about.