A mentor and guide to many, Ram Shriram, managing partner at Sherpalo Ventures and one of the first investors at Google, addressed a rapt audience last week at the Bangalore office of [24]7. Opening the hour long session with his reaction to the start up scene in India, Ram Shriram applauded the dynamic vibe of the IT capital of the country, even as he lamented the lack of infrastructure and the paucity of good Universities to channel the talent of the nation.
A few snippets from the conference for those who missed it.
Practical Mantras for Lean Startup
Talk to anyone running a startup or working in a big company turning new idea into products, they would tell you that their journey is fraught with far too many uncertainties
Lore that Lean Startup is a savior for this has spread far and wide but ask these folks and they will nod their head in agreement that they face huge struggle in adopting it. One of the big challenges is that Lean Startup is thought of as new magical management theory which it is surely not; instead it is a methodical approach in reducing market uncertainties. Lean Startup is at best described as codified past best practices by startups and individuals that have been able to successfully reduce customer and market risk.
Adopting Lean Startup is no different from any other behavior change that one goes through personally or in an organization. To change behavior and adopt new practice work on several dimensions is required which includes changed mindset, a clear understanding of principle, devoid of jargons, a simplified set of tools to aid, hands-on practice of the tools and many a times a community of peer support.
What Mindset for Lean?
Most of our life starting from school we have had an execution mindset, we were always given a set of task to do and we were graded on how we executed on them and thus behavior is quite strong. We view everything as an execution problem and solve for it
Ask anyone that has experienced running a startup and they will tell you how everything is a moving target and things change very fast. Almost everything in a startup is an assumption and needs to be fundamentally questioned even when you are executing assuming it to be true
Thus one should have a learning mindset, until key assumptions have been validated
Principle at Work
Studies suggest that the number one reason that startup fail is because they don’t have customer or market. Key principle of Lean Startup suggest that if startups prioritize and focus on eliminating the customer or market risk before others then the odds of failure can be reduced drastically.
Tools for use
Disciplined approach of listing assumption, turning them into experiments to validate, art of talking to customers, prototyping to learn customer behavior and iterating through Build > Measure > Learn loop are some of the tools available practitioners disposal to methodically address market risk
LeanMantr’s bootcamp is designed to hands-on practice scenario with real life startup ideas for folks to learn the benefit of using Lean. Last year alone 6 workshops were held in Bangalore. The next one is happening on 11-13 April (www.leanmantra.explara.com). If you would like to get immersed in the how to, then do join us
Lean Startup Circle Bangalore monthly meetups are for practitioners to trade notes and offer peer support in this behavior change journey to reduce failures of startups in general. Join any of the next meetup (attendance is free)
Guest Post by Rammohan Reddy, Lean Startup Evangelist atLeanMantra