Hi Everyone,
Congratulations on making it through the first half of the LLP course. We hope you are both enjoying the class and finding it useful. As I think everyone is aware, this is the first time the course has been offered on campus. We anticipate it will become a cornerstone of the campus’ entrepreneurship curriculum.
Given that background, we (the faculty team) have been taking stock of what’s working, what needs tweaking, and/or needs to be improved. The process is ongoing, so please be aware that we may institute a few changes over the next few weeks.
Towards the end, we would like each team to pay close attention to the following points as you finalize this week’s presentations.
1. Keep to the topic for the week. Begin by orienting the audience — add a slide (right after the title slide) that reminds us of the primary value proposition, customer segment, and MVP.
2. Focus on a single customer segment as the team’s first target unless the project calls for a multi-sided market.
3. Show all invalidated hypotheses as crossed out on the business model canvas slide. This make that slide much more meaningful.
4. Be bold. Invalidate hypotheses when the evidence calls for it. It is better to invalidate hypotheses than to hold on to them in the face of overwhelming negative evidence.
5. If you are having trouble identifying a pivot, come to our office hours.
6. Please plan for your presentation to take no more than 7 minutes. Moving forward, we are not going to interrupt with questions/comments until teams have finished their presentations. So get right to point. What did you think? What did you do (experiments)? What did you learn? What are your next steps?
In general we are going to work much harder managing the class time — and keeping the discussions focused. All for now. See you in class!
Professors Mclaughlin, Utgoff, Wooldridge