Live Blog – Lean Launchpad NY @sgblank #3
Feedback from Lunch Groups – participants met for lunch both days and discussed problems/solutions around different topics: emerging markets, Accelerators in Healthcare, launching in low density markets, etc.
- Customer discovery isn’t just about getting out of the building but getting out of the country
- How do you profile the teams?
- Psychological, technical skills, etc
- Hacker (tech), Hustler (reality distortion field), Designer (UI/UX)
- Big territory (low density) markets tend to lean toward virtual accelerators vs in person brick and mortar
Steve’s definition of Founder, three things
- Founder is a person that comes up with idea, though they may or may not be part of the founding team
- Founding Team may include the founder – but the management team in charge of the search process
- Founding CEO that’s more equal than others – a founding team isn’t all equal
Andy Sack – when I talk to the teams in TechStars early and find out a team of three is split in equal thirds, I know that they haven’t had the hard discussion yet.
Startup with your toughest problem first – don’t go after your affirmation points first. Founder’s prefer to get out of the building and validate their idea vs engaging potential customers with the toughest question first.
LLP is process driven, not content driven. So in some markets – like Rochester NY, High Tech Rochester does 15 weeks in the program, comes to NYC, gathers more feedback then goes back to Rochester for another 15 weeks in the process.
Panel Discussion
- GT Venture Lab – no equity, free program. They’ve used LLP to lets the market determine their participant success – vs. trying to triage every team themselves. Average time of engagement 60-70 weeks.
- ICorps NSF top 200 for funding – for undergrads they do a competition (and this also helps eliminate the fraternity) they get cash for housing to do the MVP over the summer and they force the engineers to take a design course
- Georgetown University – MacGyver award every week to the team that earn it. Eric recapped that they tried to do a summer program, but only implemented some of the components – it didn’t work very well.
Off to the airport…