Steve Blank

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one of the key incentives that made startups different from working in a large company

While I created the Lean LaunchPad methodology and pedagogy (how to teach the class) and the train-the-trainer course for the NSF I-Corps, the sheer scale and success of the class is due to the efforts of the 100’s of National Science Foundation instructors and the NSF. However, this year, the class was so oversubscribed, and the quality of the teams applying was so high, the teaching team admitted 14 teams and reverted to the original NSF model of separating into sections. While students want to spend their time focusing on product/market fit (who’s the customer and what should we build for them) and building product-centric minimum viable products, I thought that Y-Combinator and other accelerators already did an excellent job of that. If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here If you can’t see the presentation click here If you can’t see the video click here

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. Most painfully, you’ll learn that your role in the company has to change

The model described innovation occurring in three time horizons: * Horizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing business/model and core capabilities to new customers, markets or targets. For example, some organizations defined Horizon 1 as new features that could be delivered in 3-12 months; Horizon 2 as business/mission model extensions 24-36 months out; and Horizon 3 as creating new disruptive products/business/mission models 36-72 months out. In the government space, Russian interference with elections, and China building island bases in the South China Sea as well as repurposing ICBMs as conventional weapons to attack aircraft carriers, are examples of radical disruption using existing technologies deployed in extremely short periods of time. * Rapidly copy the new disruptive innovators and use the incumbent’s business/mission model to dominate.