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Eric Ries, The Lean Startup in London, Monday 16th January. Registration closing soon – here are the companies registered already.

January 9, 2012 by Mark T Littlewood

Thinking of coming to listen and talk about Lean Startups at next week’s event with Eric Ries – https://thebln.com/event/18544/? In exactly seven days from now we will be sitting down to listen and think.

If you want to come, please get in quick! We already have great people coming from these companies.

10CMS, 1Spatial, 21apps, 7digital, Abcam, Accel Partners, Advent Venture Partners, AEI Media Ltd, Alcatel-Lucent, Amadeus & Angels Seed Fund, Amdocs, Analysis UK Ltd, androidbloke.co.uk, Anobii, Anthemis, antrak capital, Apiary.io, Atomico, Atomico – An Investment Group, ATP, Avisen Plc, Axispoint Solutions Limited, Badgety, Bailey Fisher Executive Search, Balderton Capital, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bantr, Barbarians Gate, Basis Technologies, BBC, BBH Zag, BETCAFE.com, Betfair, Bilbus, Bing, Bit Zesty Ltd, Blink Collective, Bloomnest, blossom.io, Bossa Studios, Bowley Design, BraveNewTalent, brightsolid, Brown Rudnick, Brown Rudnick LLP, Cambridge Temperature Concepts, CDI Europe, Ceros, Channel7b, CleverRun, Clickslide, Cogenta, College Hill, Comufy, Construqtive, Conversocial, Dalati! Ltd, DataGiving, Denki, DFJ Esprit, Digital Dragonfly, Distilled, Doughty Hanson & Co, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Eduvee, Encore Ventures, Energized Work, Enternships, Enterprise Nation, E-synergy, Ether Books, Ethical Coding, Evry, Facebook, Fai, Faubourg 2050, Fidelity Growth Partners, Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room, Flattr, Flockler, Forbury Investment Network, Forrester Research, Forward Internet Group, Forward Internet Group Ltd, Forward Internet Group`, Forward Internet Ventures, Forward Venture Partners, FreeDating.co.uk, freetemps, Fuego Digital Media QSTP-LLC, Fumbe Media, Get Driven Ltd., Givey, gleambook, Globosense, globosense.com, Gnodal Limited, GoGoodJob, GoodApple Media Ltd, GrantTree Limited, GroupSpaces, Gsudi Ltd, Hallmedia, hamiltonsonline.com, handPoint, happiest, HarbourVest Partners (U.K.) Limited, HNLondon Organiser, Holiday Extras, Hotspur Capital, Housebites, HuBCluB Europe LLP, Humans Invent, Humble Technologies, ideaSpace, IDG, Imperial College, Imperial College Business School, InCrops Enterprise Hub, Index Ventures, Insane Logic, Intelli-Call, Intern Avenue, IntroAnalytics Ltd, IP Group plc, IP2IPO Limited, IS Communications, Jest, Jetsetter, Kennet Partners Ltd, Kingston Smith LLP, Kt2.0, Kulu Valley, Lectrio, legacyhub ltd, Light Blue Optics Ltd, Lightning Tools, Liveplan.com, livestation, m8 Capital, McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd, Microcosm, Microsoft Corporation, Mind Candy, Mind Candy Ltd, Minified, MinuteBox, mkodo, MMC Ventures, Mob On, Moov2 Ltd, MWAM, N/A, NESTA, NESTA Investments, NetClean Technologies, NetTek Ltd, Network Rail, Newtrade Publishing, Nicetripper, Nimbulus Consulting, Numerous, Octopus Ventures, Old Street Labs, Onalytica, OpenCredo, Orca Design Limited, Osvit, Parkwalk Advisors, Pearson, PeerIndex, Pelucid Ltd, Pembridge Partnership Ltd, Pestival, Phaenom, Pitchup.com, Potato, Profero Ltd, ProjectHUGO, proover.com, Propellernet, Proximity London, Rapid Innovation Group, Rapid Innovation Group Ltd, Real-Status, Red Morning Ltd., rehabstudio, RentMama.com, Resolve (GB) Ltd, Ribot, Rightster.com, rodsit, RolePoint, Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Samsung Electronics, Sazneo, Scottish Equity Partners, Seatwave, Seedcamp, Self, Self Employeed, Self-employed, Short Breaks, Shortbreaks, Smart Software Marketing, Social Media Strategist, SoftSpot, Software Verification, Solidus Partners LLP, Sporting Index, Springboard, Stampfeet, Startup Weekend, Startups-london, stealth, SThree London, Stimuli Limited, StormForward Ltd, Storybricks, Stylistpick, Sustain Mobile, Swapit, Swapit.co.uk, Talis Group, Tappped, tech city, Techcrunch, Technokitten.com, Teddle, Telefonica Ventures, Terra Advisors, Tesco Stores Ltd, The Beans Group, The Business Leaders Network, The Drift, The Dutchess, The Fortune Institute UK, The Internet, The Kernel, The Next Web, The Rude Baguette, Tick 7, Together London, Totaljobs, Totaljobs Group, Transmit, Trans-ocracy, Trilogy, Trinamo, uberlife, UBS, uMotif – your beautifully simple well-being tracker, very zen life, ViewsHound, Wahanda, Wall Street Journal, Waterfront Entertainment, WeRInteractive, What If! Innovation, Women Unlimited, wonga.com, Wrky, Young Foundation, Your Hidden Potential.

PLEASE NOTE

We are rapidly running out of space so PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, register quickly. We will have to close registration in the next couple of days and we simply will not be able to accommodate any more people. if you want to come, don’t leave it to the last minute. We won’t be able to squeeze, ‘just one more’ in.

Eric Ries, the Lean Startup

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Why Eric Ries’ Lean Startup isn’t just a book for businesses in the fitness sector.

January 9, 2012 by

We are delighted to partner with Springboard to bring you the UK launch of Eric Ries’ ‘Lean Startup’. Springboard bring  a great wealth of experience in all things ‘entrepreneurship’, are longstanding evangelists of ‘Lean Startup’ principles and are all about those people that ‘do’, rather than ‘talk’ startups. Springboard’s very own Joséphine Goube muses on Eric’s bestseller.

“Until recently I had not read the Lean Startup book. I was not being lazy, nor am I too busy: I am just reluctant to read business theory in general. Especially when it is about entrepreneurship. It is good to fail; why would you not want me to try it out for myself and learn? Failures are often great stories to tell when you have healed and recovered from them. How could I know that I could not handle spicy food if I did not try my friend’s Saarthak’s indian food? Moreover, experiences are unique; they are different for each of us. When my friend Saarthak was eating his dish, I was red and indulging in liters of water. Sometimes, it’s faster to feel the theory than to learn it.

However, I cannot resist any longer to ignore the Lean Startup book and eventually I read it. How can I fight against such a fierce marketing campaign anyway? At first, as a native French speaker, I didn’t understand it and thought it was a concept related to startups in the fitness sector. I was fine not understanding. Then, everyone was talking about it. Not just Eric Ries and #leanstartup tweeters, not just the entrepreneurs I meet and work with: even my close friends. The day my roommate woke me up saying “you have to read this, it will change your life”, I knew I had to read it.

Eric Ries is a magician. He has succeeded in charming all my circles of friends to make them believe that he has found the genome of entrepreneurship. Or maybe he is just a normal guy (just super smart), and has made a ‘science what was an art’ (dixit Marc Andresseen).

How do we know if his book is wrong or right? Well, as a matter of fact he has succeeded in making everyone talk about the concept of the lean startup – regardless whether he is right or wrong, he wins: like a self-fulfilling prophecy, startups are thinking lean.”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-08

January 8, 2012 by Mark T Littlewood

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The ex-vegetarian who now runs a whole animal butcher’s shop

January 7, 2012 by Mark T Littlewood

If you care about your food, appreciate skilled craftsman or just like being made to think a little bit about a better way of doing things, this is a wonderful piece about the Butcher and Larder in Chicago. A ‘whole animal’ butcher’s shop that sources real animals from small farms within 2 hours of the shop.

P&S Ep. 1 | Butcher & Larder from Sergio Salgado on Vimeo.

The colour of the pork is the colour pork should be. Once you eat meat like this, you are unlikely to rush back to Tesco for a pork chop that is the colour of chicken.

butcherlarder5

I smell bacon. Mmmmmm.

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It isn’t the industry that cannot innovate, it is the companies operating in it. The ‘industry’ will be just fine.

January 5, 2012 by Mark T Littlewood

Powerful stuff from Steve Blank in a brilliant post – “Why the movie industry can’t innovate and the result is SOPA“. Read it, it is really good and really important though I do think this is about a collection of executives in individual companies in an industry that cannot innovate. Industries innovate all the time – the examples that Steve uses demonstrate clearly that the movie industry has evolved despite the reluctance of the largest businesses in it at any one point.

The principle doesn’t just apply to the movie industry. All established industries have similar issues as they mature.

“This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

“But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

“From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business:Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.”

Here are just some of the examples that he cites read the rest here  “Why the movie industry can’t innovate and the result is SOPA“…

  • 1920’s – the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.
  • 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000today.
  • 1950’s – broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid.
  • 2000 – Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV.
  • Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

The same thing happens of course in other industries. The music, media and publishing industries are all changing rapidly because they are relatively mature industries dominated by large players where radical change is hard to achieve. In the long term, these industries will change beyond recognition but this does NOT always mean that smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses will end up as the winners, before being replaced by the next wave of nimble organisations. Large incumbents in industries exert huge power over consumers, both by controlling what they see, hear etc, but because they invest VAST amounts of money in lobbying governments to protect their franchises.

The winners will be the companies that bring real innovation in their BUSINESS MODELS so that their businesses can react to the changes in markets. Of course, the larger the business, the harder it is to be radical, one of the reasons that Clayton Christensen would suggest that disruptive businesses target small, relatively unprofitable market segments (talking about how Sony for example in the 1950s developed a portable transistor radio  that was viewed as a joke by the manufacturers of of valve radiogrammes which of course had a much better sound. The transistor radio became a toy for kids. Those kids grew up, and the transistor technology evolved and then it was too late).

Hermann Hauser gave an interesting talk about business models in the semiconductor industry. He looks at 5 waves of computing, the business models and the companies that have dominated each one.

Only one company, IBM, has been a market leader in more than one wave of computing.

While this is not about the movie industry, it is most definitely part of the same problem.

  • Technology is almost NEVER the reason a company fails. In all of Hermann’s investments, only one business failed because the technology didn’t work.
  • People and business models are the two most important factors in indicating whether a business will fail or fly.

The problem for large companies is in business model innovation and encouraging people, great managers, brilliant executives, to make decisions that are brave, long term and will probably feel dangerous or self-defeating in the short to medium term. Very few companies have been able to create long term cultures that encourage those behaviours. Perhaps this is not so surprising. It is not really in an individual’s best interests – economically or from a career perspective – to force through radical action that will probably reduce revenues and profits at a well managed business for a decade or so in order that a phoenix will rise from the flames.

Are there any companies that do this well?

Read the post. “Why the movie industry can’t innovate and the result is SOPA“.

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Eric Ries, The Lean Startup in London, 16th January 2012

January 3, 2012 by Mark T Littlewood

Best-selling author, inventor of the concept of lean startup and populariser of the concept of, ‘the pivot’, Eric Ries, is in London on 16th January to talk about The Lean Startup.

We are delighted to be producing and hosting an evening talk and Q&A with Eric. The ticket price includes a copy of Eric’s book.

Demand will be very high  – we have sold over 300 places already. Do come and join us.

We are delighted to be working with Eric and his team to share some ideas and discussions about lean with some of the UK’s best entrepreneurs. We are also delighted to announce that, in association with Tech City, we are able to expand the event to include more entrepreneurs who will be able to join the discussion in one of the world’s greatest technology centres.

  • Drinks: 17:00
  • Keynote Talk: 17:45 followed by Q&A.
  • Networking drinks: 20:00 till late.
  • Address: London, venue tba to ticket holders

Register for Eric Ries, The Lean Startup - London Edition. 16th January 2012 - C1 in London, United Kingdom on Eventbrite

To get in the mood, you can see my notes from Eric’s 2010 talk at the Business of Software Conference in Boston here.

Transcript of Eric’s talk at Business of Software 2010.

Joel Spolsky: According to this our next speaker is Eric Ries. If you’ve heard venture capitalists use the word “pivot” way too often in their conversation, like when they decide to send back an entree that they ordered, and it comes out wrong and they decide to pivot and get a different entree altogether. The person you have to thank for that is Eric Ries, his concept is the Lean Startup. He’s done about three pretty Lean Startups. The one you probably know is IMVU 3D Avatar world gaming kind of situation. He wrote Java books when he was in high school. Please welcome Eric Ries. [Applause]

Eric Ries: Thank you. Thank you all very much. I’m very excited to be here. I’ve got to tell you years ago when I was sitting in a cubicle in Microsoft and reading Joel on software I was like, “Wow, Joel, is like a major celebrity in my world.” So to get the email from Joel to say, “Come speak at my conference.” It was like, for me anyway, getting an email from Lady Gaga asking me to come perform onstage with her. I was like… Well OK, maybe it’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea, it was very exciting. So I’m very pleased to be here.

I want to just set up some quick ground rules. The most important one is that I do not want your undivided attention. So, who has a mobile phone? That’s just a question to see who’s paying attention. Not that many people, OK. Please take it out of your pocket, hold it up, thank you. Turn it on, no phones off, please. Laptops on, power on, get online, if you’re not online you’re basically not alive. So get online. And all I ask, if your attention starts to wane, whatever happens #leanstartup is the hashtag so tweet amongst yourselves.

But as you see I really welcome feedback, so if I say something that you think is worth tweeting I appreciate hearing about it. And, of course, if I say something that is too dumb for words I appreciate hearing about that too. Again #leanstartup hashtag. I have been on this journey to promote this thing called a Lean Startup for the past two years. It means I can’t get this thing on. And I wrote this blog “Startup Lessons Learned” and I never thought that I would do this for a living. I used to be an engineer and that’s a job I really understood well. This I understand less well. But what keeps me going, the reason I get excited about doing this is that I have been imploring audiences, whoever would listen basically to stop wasting people’s time. It’s actually that simple.

Most of the products that we make are never used by anybody. If you think about that, that’s got to be a preventable condition. There has to be a way for us to stop living like that. To stop pouring people’s time and talent into activities that go nowhere.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-25

December 25, 2011 by Mark T Littlewood

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