Book description
You are not a Visionary… yet.
The Lean Entrepreneur
shows you how to become one.
Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not
made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates,
and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see
clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience and
then, simply make the vision real.
Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be
visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore
all doubt. With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a
vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions;
and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride.
Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented
entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators and investors. It leads us
to heartbreaking, costly and preventable failures in new
product and venture development.
The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It
combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation and easily
actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower
individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve
problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet.
Anyone can be visionary.
The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:
- Apply actionable tips, tricks and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs.
- Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and
create new ones.
- Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products.
- Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce time
and budget for product development.
- Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour
roadblocks and set new benchmarks.
- Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal
customers and valuable products you can build to serve them.
Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets
along with bonus online videos.
Brant Cooper helps organizations big and small move the needle.
His startup career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets,
inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid
growth, and miserable failure. Brant previously authored The
Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, the first
purpose-written book to discuss lean startup and customer development
concepts, earning a distribution of over 50,000 copies. Brant has
worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs across the globe and is a
sought-after speaker, having presented at leading companies such as
Qualcomm, Intuit, Capital One, and Hewlett-Packard. Brant is reachable
@brantcooper. He lives with (and continuously learns from) his two
daughters, Riva and Eliza, near Swami's in Encinitas, California.
Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur, author, and consultant,
and more than anything wishes he were a polymath. His writing has been
featured on the Harvard Business Review blog, the Wall
Street Journal blog, and The Browser. Patrick routinely speaks
at technology conferences nationally and internationally, including
SXSW, GROW Conference, the Turing Festival, and the Lean Startup
Conference. He co-founded two startups, currently advises multiple
technology startups, and serves as a mentor for 500 Startups, a seed
fund and startup accelerator. As a principal at Moves the Needle, he
counts Fortune 100 companies in his client list. The Lean
Entrepreneur is his second book. The first, The Entrepreneur's
Guide to Customer Development, is a required course text for MBA
and undergrad at universities such as the University of Chicago Booth
School and Berkeley. He has also guest-lectured at Stanford and UCLA.
For some unknown reason, Patrick holds a master's in economics from UC
Santa Barbara. When he has spare time, he can be found on Orange
County beaches with his family. Tweet at him @Pv and read his blog at
vlaskovits. com.
