John Bradberry Charlotte, NC – ReadyFounder

Great experience last week at the 2012 Lean Startup Conference.  I’ll be digging through my notes for a while and plan to write a series of posts based on insights I gained while there.  For now, I’ve recorded a narration of the slides from my Ignite talk on Sunday night. In the real talk, the slides advanced automatically every 15 seconds — Here, I fudged a bit, just to get complete points across!  Enjoy, and I look forward to your comments.

Heading to San Francisco in a few days for the Lean Startup Conference and am looking forward to being an Ignite speaker on Sunday night.  I’ll focus on psychological undercurrents that make or break a founder’s effectiveness in applying lean startup methodology.

I’m a big fan of lean startup concepts pioneered by Eric Ries (and the customer development framework developed by Steve Blank that helped give rise to the lean startup movement).  One of our goals at ReadyFounder Services is to help popularize these approaches within the broader world of the everyday entrepreneur — beyond the technology arena — to aspiring founders of restaurants, law firms, construction companies, etc., and with any leader who’s attempting to launch a high-impact innovation.

But the effective use of these rational, market-centric tools requires the sound use of human judgment, an area where unconscious biases always come into play.

A few of the questions I’ll attempt to address (or at least tee up) during the talk:

• What neurological factors underlie a founder’s or investor’s tendency to become emotionally/intellectually attached to their creation? 
• What cognitive biases should every entrepreneur know about? 
• How can a 4-year-old kid help a startup team?
• What are “Icarus Qualities” and how do they drive entrepreneurs too close to the sun? 
• Why do we avoid “people pivots” when they are needed? 

That’s probably a lot to aspire to for a 5-minute talk — but we’ll give it our very best shot!

Hope to see you in SF.

On September 1, in partnership with Charlotte’s Business Innovation and Growth (BIG) Council, I was honored to pull together four founders and investors, all featured in my recent book, to share observations and lessons from a multitude of startup launches and investments. Here’s a description of the event and panelists.

Also in the room was a great audience of 90+ seasoned and aspiring entrepreneurs, business owners, investors (angel and VC), social entrepreneurs and non-profit leaders. I’ll post a complete video of the conversation in a week or two. For now, here’s an excerpt from my set up and a few panelist comments on “founder readiness.”

Thanks especially to Terry Cox, President/CEO of BIG Council, for expertly promoting and convening the event.

More to come in following weeks.