Today I begin the journey of Arizona State University’s Fulton School of Engineering 301 class of Entrepreneurship and Value Creation; so, ASU’s FSE-301 class. The class goals revolve around Rigorous Evidence-Based Action-Oriented Learning for the entrepreneur process. This is one of our first class requirements, to post about what we learned from the first weeks required videos and articles.
I think from the video from Eric Ries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65PaoTlVKg) that discusses the issue of “Stop Wasting Peoples Time” the biggest lesson I learned was the true meaning of LEAN startups. I had always thought of this process more along the lines of bootstrapping the startup process and not spending money and hoping people show up for what you built. But, the reality is that LEAN startup methodology could more easily be described with speed between pivots and how often we can get around the “Build, Measure, Learn” loop. It’s about increasing the rate at which we can pivot based on data driven learning.
I also appreciated the definition of entrepreneurship being management during a period of extreme uncertainty. If that is definition of entrepreneurship that we will be applying this methodology to, then the scope of how and where this applies is much larger in this world of uncertainty we live in. The list of companies that use his LEAN startup, those that are out of business, provides further evidence of this uncertainty.