The Lean Startup

Eric Ries is the best-selling author of the Lean Startup and the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.

Eric is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

Founding Partner, 500 Startups

Dave McClure is a greedy, blood-sucking venture capitalist & the founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. He likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally help or invest in their startups if they are foolish enough to let him.

Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.

Dave also likes to play ultimate frisbee when his knees don’t hurt.

Serial Entrepreneur & Professor

Put to a vote, Steve Blank might have been chosen “least likely to succeed” in his New York City high school class. Steve’s path has taken him from repairing fighter planes in Thailand during the Vietnam War, to spook stuff in undisclosed location(s), and Steve was lucky enough to arrive at the beginning of the boom times of Silicon Valley in 1978.

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, Steve retired in 1999. He co-founded his last company, E.piphany, in his living room in 1996. Steve’s other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

After Steve retired, he took some time to reflect on his experience and wrote a book (actually his class text) about building early stage companies called Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Steve moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that Steve developed in his book is one of the core themes in these classes. In 2009, he was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. The same year, the San Jose Mercury News listed Steve as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley. In 2010, Steve was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Steve also followed his curiosity about why entrepreneurship blossomed in Silicon Valley and was stillborn elsewhere. It has led to several talks on The Secret History of Silicon Valley.

In 2007 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Steve to serve on the California Coastal Commission, the public body which regulates land use and public access on the California coast. (The NY Times described the work of the Commission here.)

In 2010 Steve was appointed to the Expert Advisory Panel for the California Ocean Protection Council.

Steve is on the board of Audubon California (and its past chair) and spent several years on the Audubon National Board. He is also a board member of Peninsula Open Space Land Trust (POST). In 2009 he became a trustee of U.C. Santa Cruz and joined the board of the California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV).

USERcycle

Ash Maurya is the founder of USERcycle. Since bootstrapping his last company seven years ago, he has launched five products and one peer-to-web application framework. He has been rigorously applying customer development and lean start-up techniques to his products, which he frequently writes about on his blog and recently turned into a book: Running Lean.

Ash holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and resides in Austin, Texas, with his wife, two children and two dogs.

CEO, LUXr

Janice is an entrepreneur, designer, and advisor to early stage companies. She has raised capital, founded both successful and failed startups, and consulted to both large enterprises & tiny startups. Along the way Janice has learned a lot about what makes some teams thrive and others wither.

At LUXr she’s answering the question, “How can regular, smart people do predictably good user experience work in an agile or Lean Startup™ environment?” She believes the answer lies in the operating practices and behaviors of the team.

Janice has been a guest lecturer at Stanford, Haas, Northwestern, CCA and the Presidio Graduate School of Management. Prior to starting LUXr, Janice was a founding partner of Adaptive Path and served as the company’s first CEO.

Video Blogger & Media Innovator

Robert Scoble is a tech enthusiast, video blogger, and media innovator, and is fanatical about startups. He travels the world interviewing the most innovative companies and people, always on the search for world-changing technologies. A native of Silicon Valley, Scoble has been building online communities since 1985. He started Scobleizer.com in 2000, spent three years as an evangelist at Microsoft, and was one of the founders of Microsoft’s Channel9 video community.

Co-founder & CTO, HubSpot

Dharmesh is co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.  HubSpot provides inbound marketing software that helps businesses attract, convert and engage customers on the web.  The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts has over 6,000 customers and was ranked the second fastest growing software company in the Inc. 500.  HubSpot has raised over $60 million in venture capital.

Dharmesh is the co-author of “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” published by Wiley in October, 2009.  The book has been one of the top 50 marketing books on Amazon for over 2 years.

He also authors OnStartups.com, a popular startup blog with over 220,000 members in its online community.  He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 30 startups and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and inbound marketing.

Dharmesh has a B.S. in Computer Science from UAB and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT.

CEO, Etsy

Chad Dickerson is the CEO of Etsy, the marketplace for independent, creative businesses. Chad was CTO at Etsy from September 2008 until July 2011.

Before joining Etsy in fall 2008, Chad led the Brickhouse and Advanced Products teams at Yahoo!. Prior to this role, Chad was senior director of the Yahoo! Developer Network and launched the Hack Day program globally at Yahoo!

Chad came to Yahoo! from InfoWorld Media Group (IDG) where he served as CTO for nearly five years. Prior to InfoWorld, Dickerson served as CTO of Salon.com and in various engineering positions at CNN, CNN/Sports Illustrated, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The (Raleigh, NC) News & Observer. Dickerson holds a BA in English literature from Duke University.

Chief Technology Officer

Todd Park has served as HHS’s Chief Technology Officer since August 2009. In this role, his mission is to be a change agent and “entrepreneur-in-residence,” helping HHS harness the power of data, technology, and innovation to improve the health of the nation. Prior to joining HHS, Mr. Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry. He also cofounded Castlight, a web-based health care shopping service for consumers. Mr. Park has also served in a volunteer capacity as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he focused on health IT and health reform policy, and as senior health care advisor to Ashoka, a leading global incubator of social entrepreneurs, where he helped start Healthpoint Services, a venture to bring affordable telehealth, drugs, diagnostics, and clean water to rural India. Mr. Park graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with an A.B. in economics.

CEO, Hipmunk

Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Hipmunk, the travel search site. Prior to establishing Hipmunk in 2010, Adam co-founded BookTour with Wired’s Chris Anderson. He graduated from MIT in 2010 with degrees in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and was North American Debating Champion in 2010. Adam was also the youngest author ever at O’Reilly, writing AppleScript: The Missing Manual at the age of 16. Adam currently lives in San Francisco.

President & CEO, Wealthfront

Andy Rachleff is President and CEO of Wealthfront, an SEC registered investment adviser offering an online service that makes it easy for anyone to access sophisticated financial advice. He is a co-founder and former general partner of Benchmark Capital. He’s also on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a variety of courses on technology entrepreneurship.

Co-founder & CTO, LivingSocial

Aaron Batalion is a husband, father, geek, and entrepreneur… and also the co-founder and head technologist for LivingSocial, the local commerce platform.

Having served billions of page views per month to building world class engineering teams, Aaron helped lead HungryMachine, later LivingSocial, from a 4 man team building top Facebook applications to 5000+ employees around the world connecting local customers to local merchants.

Aaron currently lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a big local presence helping to push the start-up scene forward.

Managing Director

Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a company that helped launch and operate software companies. Brad is also a co-founder of TechStars.

Brad currently serves on the board of directors of BigDoor Media, Cheezburger Networks, Fitbit, Gnip, MakerBot Oblong, Orbotix, and Standing Cloud for Foundry Group. Previously, Brad served as chief technology officer of AmeriData Technologies. AmeriData acquired Feld Technologies, a firm he founded in 1987 that specialized in custom software applications. Brad had grown Feld Technologies into one of Boston’s leading software consulting firms prior to the acquisition. He also directed the diversification into software consulting at AmeriData, a $1.5 billion publicly-traded company which was acquired by GE Capital in 1995.

In addition to his investing efforts, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations and currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, co-chair of Startup Colorado, and on the board of Startup Weekend. Brad is a nationally recognized speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship and writes the widely read blogs Feld Thoughts and Ask the VC.

Founder & Chairman of the Executive Committee

Scott Cook co-founded Intuit Inc. in 1983 and now serves as the chairman of the Executive Committee. Before founding Intuit, Cook managed consulting assignments in banking and technology for Bain & Company, a corporate strategy consulting firm. He previously worked for Procter & Gamble, the household products giant, in various marketing positions, including brand manager, for four years. Cook is a member of the board of directors of eBay; Procter & Gamble; the Asia Foundation; the Harvard Business School Dean’s Advisory Board; the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin; and the Intuit Scholarship Foundation. Cook earned an MBA from Harvard University and received a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Southern California.

Head of Business Development, TaskRabbit

Victor is TaskRabbit’s head of business development, overseeing strategic partnerships for marketing, business services and marketplace operations. He has been with the company since February of 2011, prior to which he was the founder and CEO of Frenting, a San Francisco-based startup that allowed users to find and share physical items with those in their community. Victor is also the founder of DabNab, a marketplace that helped consumers decide what to buy by letting them try out consumer electronics before purchasing.

Prior to founding Frenting and DabNab, Victor spent time as an associate at Benchmark Capital, evaluating investments in the semiconductor industry. Victor also served as a consultant with Pillar Ventures.

He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from The University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He is an avid triathlete with an ambitious stretch goal to “never finish last,” and enjoys cooking Spanish food – because it’s the best food on earth.

Founder & Managing Partner

Thomas Korte is the Founder and Managing Partner of AngelPad, a startup mentorship program he launched in 2010 with a team of fellow ex-Googlers. Since then, AngelPad has helped to launch some 37 companies, 31 of which have raised over $25 million in additional funding. Prior, Thomas Korte spent seven years at Google where he was the first international Product Manager and later their first Product Evangelist. Thomas also holds patents for online advertising optimization and local search algorithms, something true geeks will appreciate. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son. Follow him on Twitter and Angel.co @thomask

Director of Digital Strategy

Macon Phillips serves as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy at The White House. As the Director of Digital Strategy at the White House, Phillips develops and manages the Obama Administration’s online program, including WhiteHouse.gov.

Phillips ran the new media program for the Presidential Transition Team (Change.gov) and served as the Deputy Director of the Obama campaign’s new media department (BarackObama.com).

Prior to the campaign, Phillips led Blue State Digital’s strategy practice, working with clients like the Democratic National Committee and Senator Ted Kennedy. A proud Americorps*VISTA alum, the Huntsville, Alabama native is a graduate of Duke University.

Lead of Product & Innovation

Joe Zadeh (a.k.a. “Joebot”) is Lead of Product & Innovation at Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world. Much of his efforts are focused on keeping engineering and design tightly integrated to enable world-class online and offline experiences. He joined the company as an engineer when the entire product development team worked out of a bedroom in a San Francisco apartment. In a previous life, Joe was a research scientist and holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Caltech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

Founder & CEO

Juan Diego Calle, a serial entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of .CO Internet S.A.S., the registry operator for the .CO top level domain. Under Juan’s leadership, .CO was launched internationally in July of 2010, and has quickly become one of the most successful domain extensions in history, with more than 1 million domain names registered by people and companies in 200 countries worldwide.
At the ripe, old age of 20, Juan co-founded TeRespondo.com, the largest online search advertising network in Latin America. The company operated in USA, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, prior to being acquired by Yahoo, Inc. in 2005. Subsequently, Juan founded FederatedTravel.com, a large, global network of premium travel websites, including popular destination sites like ParisHotels.com, NewYorkHotels.com and LondonHotels.com, among others.
A committed triathlete and increasingly competent first-time Dad—Juan is a voracious learner whose greatest passion is business and entrepreneurship. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner-President Management Program. Prior to that, he had tried, quite unsuccessfully, to study Industrial Engineering and Finance at the University of Miami

Developer Evangelist

Rob Spectre is a punk rock technolologist having a barrel of monkeys on the Internet. Doing just about anything for a good laugh, Rob is an ardent support of open source software and creative commons art, the startup scene in New York and every professional sports club from Boston. Previously working in network and software engineering roles at SugarCRM and Boxee, Rob serves the Twilio developer community as an evangelist and obscenely loud cheerleader.

Living and working in Brooklyn, Rob loves laughing, writing and failing to act his age by staying out of the mosh pit.

CMO

Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur, mentor and author. He has founded two startups, serves as CMO at Drumbi and co-wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

His writing on debunking the origin of Henry Ford’s “faster horses” has been featured on Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal blog and The Browser.

Patrick has spoken at tech conferences nationally, including SXSW Interactive (Austin, Texas), Michigan Lean Startup Conference, Lean Startup Machine San Francisco/Chicago/New York as well as internationally, The Turing Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland), Leancamp (multiple), SVC2LX (Lisbon, Portugal). He tweets at @pv and blogs vlaskovits.com. Patrick enjoys advising (Drumbi, Chromatik) and mentoring and serves as a mentor for the 500 Startups and for The Lean Startup Machine.

He organizes the Los Angeles Lean Startup Meetup which boasts almost 2,000 members. Previous speakers include Hiten Shah, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Jason Calacanis, Janice Fraser, Dave Binetti and Dan Martell. In past years, he also organized Twiistup, a well-attended tech/startup conference that celebrates the entrepreneurial and investment talent of the Los Angeles startup ecosystem.

Patrick holds a Master’s in Economics (emphases in finance and econometrics) from University of California, Santa Barbara. When he has spare time, he can be found with his family usually on the beach or in the ocean either fishing, surfing or stand-up paddle surfing.

Co-Authors, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over four decades. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

A popular writer and speaker, Mary literally wrote the book on Lean Software Development, along with her husband, Tom Poppendieck. Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, was published in 2003 and won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, was published in 2006, and Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point, was published in November, 2009.

Tom Poppendieck has a PhD in Physics; his considerable modeling and mentoring skills are rooted in his experience as a physics professor. His early work in IT infrastructure, product development, and manufacturing support, evolved to consulting project assignments in healthcare, logistics, mortgage banking, and travel services.

Tom is co-author of the book Lean Software Development: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, was published in 2003 and won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, was published in 2006, and Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point, was published in November, 2009.

CTO, Rally Software

Zach is CTO of Rally Software and AgileZen, the collaboration platforms that allow companies to build great products faster with Agile and Lean practices. Prior to joining Rally, Zach was co-founder of a startup that radically changed how creative professionals managed projects. His company was acquired by publicly-traded Creo, Inc., now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark, where he provided the technological vision for the company that led the creation of the desktop publishing market. At the age of 13, Zach began commercially publishing software and, at age 16, started a successful consulting business. A Boettcher Scholar, Zach received his BS with distinction in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Colorado. He lives near Boulder, Colorado and enjoys playing golf, mountain biking and spending time with his family.

Founding Partner

Jeff Gothelf has spent a 14 year career as an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. In addition, Jeff is the author of the upcoming O’Reilly book (2012), Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience. He is a highly sought-after international speaker having presented at EuroIA, SXSW, IA Summit, Interaction (IxDA), London IA, the Agile conference and Startup Lessons Learned. Jeff has led cross-functional product design teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, AOL while maintaining a strong advisory and mentorship presence in the startup communities of New York City and Silicon Valley. Most recently he launched Proof – a lean product innovation studio in NYC.

Founder & CEO

For the past 3 years Manuel has been applying Lean Startup principles to build Food on the Table from a single customer to a thriving startup with hundreds of thousands of users. After spending the early years of his career in the worlds of package goods and beverage marketing he pursued his passion for technology and transitioned to a seven year stint in consumer product and marketing roles at Dell Inc.

Senior Advisor

Aneesh Chopra was appointed by President Obama as the nation’s first United States Chief Technology Officer. As an Assistant to the President, he designed the National Wireless Initiative and executed an “open innovation” strategy across the agencies built on private sector collaboration – opening data to transform health, energy and education markets, convening tech leaders to develop consensus standards, and sponsoring prizes, challenges and competitions to tap into entrepreneurial problem solvers. Chopra previously served as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology and has returned as a Senior Advisor with the Advisory Board Company, a global research, consulting, and technology firm helping hospital executives to better serve patients, where he previously served as Managing Director. In 2011, Chopra was named toModern Healthcare’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare (#39) and in 2008, to Government Technology magazine’s Top 25 in their Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers issue. Chopra earned his master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University in 1997 and his bachelor’s degree from The Johns Hopkins University in 1994.

Troublemaker

Tristan Kromer pokes, prods, and questions startups. He’s spent 10 years in the music industry, worked 5 years in IT security, lived in 5 different countries, studied philosophy and business (separately), and generally made a nuisance of himself for the past 3 years in Silicon Valley. Tristan tweets dubiously useful information and blogs about lean startups and customer development.