By Getting Out of the Building

One of our exhortations to startups is “Get out of the building”. It means, “Get out of the building and go meet your customers. Many of the business hypotheses that we come up with in our heads are just theories on paper, and are usually wrong. That’s why it’s important to get out of the building, talk to customers, and get better insights from the field.

• Instead of looking for “what you want to do”, look at “what you should do” - 🐴 (horse)

Steve Blank Teaching Entrepreneurship – By Getting Out of the Building The gist of Steve Blank’s post “Teaching Entrepreneurship - By Getting Out of the Building” is as follows

• Taught E145, a class teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s College of Engineering. The goal was to teach science and engineering undergraduates how to turn technical ideas into profitable, scalable enterprises.
• He taught that a startup is an organization that searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. A business model is a way for a company to create, deliver, and capture value.
• Students formed teams of five and worked in teams of five to come up with a business idea and then went out and did a hands-on project to test the business model. This is an approach called “customer development.
• For the final presentation, each team was required to summarize their idea, clarify the problem, analyze the magnitude of the opportunity, present a solution, and diagram their business model.
• Lessons taught in class included 1) entrepreneurship is an art, not a science, 2) it is best learned through a combination of theory and practice, 3) business models do not survive the first contact with customers, and 4) adaptability and resilience are tested in the outside world. In short, he argues that the key to teaching the entrepreneurial process is to get out of the classroom and interact directly with customers.

relevance - Doing things that don’t scale

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