It all started in Puerto Rico. With a lady named Katerina. Well, it started before then, but Katerina made it happen. In 2015, I was invited to co-teach a Lean Startup program called I-Corps Puerto Rico. The event was put on by a non-profit, Grupo Guayacán. The program was based on the principles of NSF‘s […]
Category Archives: building capacity
I love I-Corps Puerto Rico
I-Corps PR is the ideal launching place for innovative business ideas in Puerto Rico. Since 2015, throughout eight cohorts, the program has graduated more than 90 teams, of which nearly 90 percent are still active. I’m happy to be part of the teaching team with Grupo Guayacán and I-Corps South.
A Unicorn Nursery
Creating a nursery to care for baby unicorns Could we create a nursery to care for baby unicorns? Doubtful. The unicorn designation is granted to businesses that hit a huge financial milestone. It’s near impossible to predict which startup has the potential to scale to that size. And some startups, by the nature of the […]
Failure: a love story
It is the nature of startups that most will fail. Startups are hard. They fail for many reasons: wrong product, wrong price, wrong distribution channel, weak marketing, and so on. Part of what we teach in Lean Startup (also known as Evidence Based Entrepreneurship) is how to reduce the risk of failure. Statistics have shown […]
What’s the value of customer discovery?
What’s the value of customer discovery? Every serial entrepreneur I’ve ever talked to (except Sanjay) recognizes the value of customer discovery. (We’ll talk about Sanjay later.) My buddy Jeff declared: If we had spent the first three months doing discovery, we would have known what to spend money on. Yes, exactly. Three assets the entrepreneur […]
So, if we don’t teach students to pitch, what should we teach them?
So, if we don’t teach students to pitch, what should we teach them? I’ve said before the we shouldn’t spend time teaching students to pitch. Pitching is a high-stakes game at best and an exercise in futility for most. But we should teach students to present. Isn’t pitching the same as presenting? No. Pitching is […]