Lean LaunchPad – The Next Generation

The decision of the U.S. to shut off intelligence and throttle the military version of Starlink called Starshield to Ukraine may have been a blip in the news in the US, but it has sent tremors across Europe.

Announcing a Lean Educators Conference. Teaching Lean in the Age of AI. November 18-19th at K&S Ranch, California.

The DoW urgently needs to organize its scattered subterranean warfare assets into a single unified organization. Ideally, a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager (DRPM) for Subterranean Warfare, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of War. (The Department already uses this model for unmanned systems, critical weapons and Golden Dome.) This group would have three portfolios: Subterranean Resilience, Subterranean Sensing and Subterranean Defeat. The office would integrate validated requirements, experimentation, testing, acquisition, and fielding.

This is a four-part series on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

This is the third of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.