You’re reading a four-part series on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us Part 2: AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP Part 3: The World Outside the Classroom Changed, The Class Didn’t This post: Lean LaunchPad – The Next Generation Lean LaunchPad – The Next Generation While AI accelerates product development and customer discovery

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants This is the third of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us Part 2: AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP Part 3: This Post Part 4: Lean LaunchPad – The Next Generation The Lean LaunchPad has successfully accommodated 15 years of evolution of technology and markets – unti

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us – This Post Part 2: AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP Part 3: The World Outside the Classroom Changed, The Class Didn’t Part 4: Lean LaunchPad – The Next Generation Next Week Part 3: The World Outside the Cl

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants . 15 years ago, my Lean LaunchPad class changed how entrepreneurship is taught. The class is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide and helped launch thousands of startups. But this past summer, I got thinking about whether AI killed our Lean LaunchPad class, and with it the Lean Startup and Customer Development. I realized that if we wan

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions. During the 2026 s

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great , by Eric Ries . Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix. Some will read this book, think it’s interesting and then get back to figuring out to how get their next bi

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than the previous classes. (I’ll summarize some of th

This article previously appeared in The Cipher Brief . For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event – the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. We braced for a one-time shock we would absorb and adapt to. NIST (the National Institut

This article previously appeared in the Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era. Teams showed up to the first day of class with MVPs (Minimal Viable Products) lookin

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems ( THAAD , Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that 2) undefended high value fixed civilian infrastructure – oil

Join us at The 7th Annual Red Queen Conference April 22 -23 – Silicon Valley How do Portfolio Acquisition Executives and COCOMs ensure they’re working on the right problem with the right priority before locking in a requirement? Discuss, share and prototype Innovation Targeting concepts with your peers. Get hands-on with the companies and venture capitalists, on how to do a “technical terrain walk

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die. I just had coffee with Chris, a startup founder I invested in six years ago. Since then he’s been heads-down fo

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here .) Recently my wife and I had something happen that made us reevaluate a 25-year-old relationship.

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply even though AI Agents will upend all of this and PR will end up being one of the many businesses that will no longer e

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32 Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened. And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives. This is one of those stories. Over a decade ago, I was a public official and was at one of our commission meetings on the coast of Cal

This article previously appeared in Defense Scoop The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.) Deputy Secretary of War Steven Feinberg ran Cerebus Capital Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll was a former VC and investment banker

TL;DR DoW Directory revision 3 is Online here , Order a print copy here. In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) – 3,096 pages of legislative text and 636-page Joint Explanatory Stateme

Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performance to delivering advanced weapons at speed. Taking decades to deliver weapons is no longer an option. The DoW has joined the 21 st century and adopted Lean Methodology. Two organizations ought to be very

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders best practices – in a language and process that was easy to understand and imple

The October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging. Those inside the DoW have little perspective of how hard it is to understand what to an outsider looks like in an impenetrable, incredibly complex sys