Eric Ries says; “Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup.” He’s right, but they did work in a garage last night when we premiered Pollenizer Academy. With a background in theatre, Pollenizer Co-Founder, Phil Morle, was unable to resist the mise en scène afforded by the larger of Pollenizer’s three garages and the starchy energy of every entrepreneurial foods such as jelly beans and noodles.
Playing to a full-house, the audience ranged from budding startup entrepreneurs and new Pollenizer employees looking to “create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty” to experienced corporate leaders hoping to create new products and services under conditions of extreme bureaucracy.
The theme for this first session of the inaugural “Building Lean Startups” course was “Disrupt” The target of this disruption was the local community newspaper. Using Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas as the bare-bones business modelling tool for this newspaper of the future, the class broke away into small groups and were challenged by Phil and the Pollenizer coaches to retrain their brains, to think differently and, more often than not, counter-intuitively.
It was fun remixing our business models with some help from George Costanza from who we learn to do the opposite to find magic.
For their final performance, the groups were asked to pitch their new businesses to their new cohort of lean-thinking colleagues who, in turn, scored their efforts in an “Idea Tournament.”
But don’t get too comfortable! Where there’s a course, there’s homework. And in true lean style, the groups were tasked with returning to class next week with a “validated learning” – proof that either validates or invalidates their business hypothesis in the form of real feedback from actual and/or potential customers. “No guys, not a ‘strategic plan’, we want physical proof.”
Good luck to our Winter class of 2012, because next week you’ll be handed over to Phil’s partner in crime – Mick Liubinskas – where you’ll focus or die!