 cooperation. I welcome you to our third installment of our GIST Global Innovation through Science and Technology Guru Web Chat series. Guru Web Chats are a way for you, the global audience, to ask our US subject matter experts questions about topics on innovation and science and technology entrepreneurship. Guru Web Chats are only one of many programs that just has to offer. I encourage all of you to look at www.gistnetwork.org to find out more. Our guru today is Dr. Chuck Easley, an assistant professor at Stanford Technology Ventures Program. He will be sharing his insights on the topic success factors for entrepreneurial ventures. Chuck will share his research and findings on entrepreneurial teams and mentors, business models that include fixed models and adaptive models, and then what synergies exist among these areas to provide for the most profitable ventures. Chuck has much experience in this area having spent 10 years in and around startups. He has founded three startups of his own, is a board member on three additional startups, and has worked with two venture capital firms, flagship ventures and Lux Capital. He has also launched NovoEd.com, an online learning platform that provides engaging online learning tools, supports a peer-to-peer network, and helps entrepreneurs learn how to build and lead teams. I'm also proud to say that Chuck has reached over 200,000 students to date with his courses. Chuck is one of our gist mentors, and he is able to connect with innovators and entrepreneurs globally, from Kenya to Jordan to Nepal. Now if you have any comments or questions during our chat, please use the chat roll on the right hand side of your screen, or use hashtag just guru. So without further ado, Chuck, welcome to our guru series. Thank you so much, and we're really looking forward to your presentation. Sure thing. Thanks, Chas. It's a real pleasure to be here with you all, and I'm looking forward to the Q&A, but I wanted to go ahead and just jump right in and present a little bit of background information from some of the research that I've been working on. So if you can see my screen, all right. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the success factors for entrepreneurial ventures that I've been working on in terms of research, and then also incorporating into the classroom here at Stanford, and also through my online class. So what's different about this course and this approach? So what I try to do is take a science and engineering approach to entrepreneurship, being here in the engineering school at Stanford. So you can think of this as the scientific method applied to startups. So we really try to combine both theory and practice, and to be driven by research and areas such as the optimal team composition, what kind of market to approach, ideal characteristics of the idea or technology, and then what I'm going to be focusing on a little bit today is the optimal startup process. So these are a few photos from my classes here at Stanford and online. So some of the former students that I'm particularly proud of, I had Bobby Murphy in the class who went on to create Snapchat. She's a Shahid, who's the executive director of the Malala Foundation, and then you can also see up in the upper right-hand corner, Partha Saxena, who was one of the students in the online class and went on to create a very successful company called Tommy Jams. Chuck, just for a moment, I'm not sure if our viewers are able to see your photos. Oh, is the screen share isn't working? Perhaps not. Oh, let me give it one more try to see if I can get it to work. We'd love to see your presentation. I know our viewers are really excited. Yeah, sorry about that. It's working now? Okay, great. Okay. Terrific. So these were some of the photos of the former students. You can think of the class and also my approach to entrepreneurship in general in terms of this diagram, which basically makes the entrepreneurial process down into opportunity recognition and then the pursuit of opportunity, gathering the people and organization and resources in capital that are needed to fulfill that opportunity that you found in the market, and then obviously this is all surrounded by a broader policy and cultural environment. So I'm going to be talking today about two approaches to the startup process, a fixed or planning approach where you have vision, you then plan out the startup and execute on that plan. Alternatively, there's the adaptive approach where you're open to adapting your vision, you're very open to changing or pivoting that vision, and this is argued to be much more suitable to a very highly uncertain environment that's rapidly changing, such as the one that many entrepreneurs find themselves in. So the other aspect that's often important in entrepreneurship is finding a good mentor. So when we did this study with the online class, in addition to randomizing teams to different startup processes, we also randomized to different types of mentor ties. So on the one hand, you might look for more cohesive ties. So this would be a mentor where you have a lot of overlapping social connections, there's very high trust, and perhaps as a result of that better collaboration. On the other hand, you might look for a mentor that has more diverse ties from your own. These connections to people who you don't know offers more novel information and perhaps more novel resources. So we suspected that there might be some interaction between the social network and the mentor that you find and the approach that you bring to the startup process. So what were the findings? We looked at statistical results from data on over a thousand ventures. We looked at their performance both at the end of the class and then the performance of their startup ventures two years later. What we found was that the worst approach was the adaptive approach with a mentor that had cohesive or overlapping network ties with your own. Or the planning approach at the two-year follow-up resulted in the worst performance in terms of survival, in terms of revenues, and also in terms of raising external funding. The best approaches, planning work best at the end of the class. However, two years later, in terms of the actual startup outcomes, the adaptive approach, particularly when combined with a mentor who has diverse social network ties from your own, resulted in the best performance in terms of revenues, survival, and external fundraising. So that's a little bit about one of the research projects that I've been working on. I also want to highlight my online class which is also available via the GIST network and is offered through Novoed.com. So there are thousands of students signing up, finding mentors, and going through largely the same class that I'm teaching here at Stanford but available for free online. So thank you all. And Jaz, I'll turn it back over to you for the Q&A. Well, thank you so much, Chuck. You've offered us a lot of insight into an overview of several aspects of the planning versus adaptive approaches. You spoke a little bit about mentors and teams. And we actually have a lot of questions already coming in from our viewers. And we only have about 40 minutes, so I'm going to go ahead and jump right in. The first one we're going to start with is the discussion of these two types of approaches, the planning model and the adaptive model. Shani Query commented that many startup companies nowadays are based on rethinking of present technology rather than innovating a completely new one. What are your thoughts on the benefits of pursuing one over the other in terms of time and effort? Yeah, so I think what we find from the previous research is that startups often get started in a new market niche and often with the new technology. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be a completely new to the world technology. So what Shannon's talking about with some minor modification, that's not necessarily a bad idea. If you particularly are pursuing it in a new market niche, that can often reduce some of the uncertainty and the risk and increase the speed to market. So I think the important thing is to still be adaptive even though it's a minor modification to the technology. You still need to understand the market side of it, how to do the sales and marketing distribution. All these things still need to be tested and experimented with. Of course and that actually leads to a perfect follow-up question we have from the Franklin Center in Tunisia. They asked how a startup can grow and reach beyond the specific community it originally targeted to meet the needs of a wider range of beneficiaries at an international level and I think you spoke a bit to this in your previous answer. But the main question here is how do you go from a local community to the international marketplace as you balance having a fixed plan in an adaptive approach? Yeah, so the first thing that I would say there is that you really want to make sure that you're completely making the existing market happy before you start to expand. What we see is that a lot of startups tend to expand too quickly and you really want to work out the bugs and make sure that the existing market and existing customers are really saturated before you think about expanding to other markets. The step to international markets in particular, it's increasingly possible with more web-based technologies. There's less need for physical assets and stores to be opened up, so that tempts a lot of people into trying it. But it's still a big step for a relatively young and small startup company. So you need to go through the process again of laying out your hypotheses, testing that new market, making sure that product is really something that suits that need in the international market. So before you start spending a lot of resources in terms of time and money and going after international markets, you really want to make sure that you've exhausted and completely saturated the local market there, which you often know much more about. Absolutely. I think it's very beneficial for entrepreneurs to know what kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem and the pre-existing culture that they have. Because in some areas you might not have an established innovative support system and entrepreneurs, as you had mentioned earlier, might be more willing to take risks. But on the other hand, if you have an established ecosystem and you do have in-country support, such as from angel investors, then you might be less tolerant of risk because you have a fixed model. So thank you for that question, Tunija. Our next question comes from Ethan Lee-Wanag from the United States. And he would like to know, with entrepreneurs learning so much for their first startups, whether they failed or were successful, what can a budding entrepreneur do to get the most out of their first projects? Is it networking, experimentation with techniques, or just plain experience with the successes and failures? Yeah. So I think, you know, when you're thinking about a first startup project, you want to think carefully about the work experience that you've had up until this point. So there's a lot of research by Steve Klepper and others that has shown that work experience at leading companies within the industry gives your eventual startup a much greater likelihood of success. So if you're using some technology that's related to the technology used in the company that you worked in before, or if you're addressing a market that's related to the market that you worked on in your prior employment, that pre-entry work experience turns out to be a really important success factor for your venture. So that's the first thing is to be strategic about your work experience and to gather some knowledge in the market and the technology while you're working for what's hopefully one of the leading companies in that industry. The second thing is I did some research on first-time entrepreneurs relative to serial entrepreneurs that have more startup experience. And what I found is that the first-time entrepreneurs have a more level playing field. The more novel the environment and the startup is. So if this is a brand new industry, you know, social networking sites at the time when Facebook was created for instance, or if this is a very novel technology, then even the people in the industry that have years of experience don't have experience relative to this technology or to this brand new industry. So these new markets and very novel technologies offer more of a level playing field for a first-time entrepreneur. Great, and actually in our previous guru, we talked a lot about robotics and how that was a niche for first-time entrepreneurs. So I think that your comments are very key and very important to keep in mind. Another critical point that we talk about with these two different types of approaches is how to secure investment. So we know that, we mentioned a bit previously, angel investors or other investors really want to have a startup that has a very strong business model and can articulate very simply in their pitch what the model will do and how it will enter the market and why it will satisfy me. But then this entire time, we've also talked about the need to be adaptive. How do you merge these two approaches when you're looking for investment and selling to the investors that just because you adapt does not mean that your model will fail. Yeah, so I think one of the keys here is that this adaptive approach should actually get you into the market and showing real traction with customers in the market much earlier. Because if you're willing to go out there and run small-scale experiments quickly, then that means you're not waiting for months of doing product development before you expose potential users to your product or to your potential solution. So if you've gone through this adaptive process in the right way where you're getting out there early and trying to make potential sales or at least showing some traction with users in the market, then by the time you get around to raising money from investors, you're going to have a lot more experience with the market, a lot more people using the product. And it turns out that it's those milestones in actually getting users and learning things about the market more quickly that tends to reassure investors that you can make rapid progress and that you're also getting the kind of uptake that they're looking for in the market. The other thing I would say has been a lot of research done on the fundraising process. And in terms of raising money, one of the important things is to have some social network and some connections with investors ahead of time. Ideally when you got to raise money, it's not necessarily the first time that you've met these people. So if you can get to know some of the entrepreneurs that they've invested in previously and get connected with them. My colleague Kathy Eisenhardt and one of her former students, they did a study of venture capital fundraising and identified a few tactics, one of which they call casual dating, where you basically, before you're actually raising money, you start to meet with the investors and the conventional wisdom that when you're looking for money, ask for advice was very key in kind of building up those relationships and getting some early feedback before you make a more formal pitch for funding. And I think that's a perfect way where our mentor segment will come in when we discuss mentors a little bit later. But just to keep on this on this topic for now, Cara Luba, Maria from Pisa, Italy poses this question. What is the next phase of your personal research going to be? Or more broadly, what do you think about the next best thing in researching entrepreneurial ventures is generally? Sure, sure. So at this stage for me, a lot of my research is driven by the interests of my PhD students. So I'm largely driven by what they're interested in. So some of the first year, second year PhD students that I'm working with, their interests are in clean energy and entrepreneurship. So I have one student from China that's been interested in some potential solutions to the need for cleaner energy sources there. Another student is very interested in digital platforms and the strategies of both the complementers that come on to the platform, but also the strategies of platform creators and how they think about what aspects of the API to open up to the community and what kind of culture they create on the platform. So I'm very interested in those areas. I also have a student that's doing some work with Alibaba in China and then I'm very interested in continuing to do work with the online class because I think that's a great avenue for learning more about the startup process. Fantastic. Well, Emil from Milan would like to know why, in your opinion, and again this might be a why or a whether you agree, that competition between startup ecosystems is based more on competition between cities rather than competition between nations and I think it actually is a whether you agree with that statement and if you do, what the reasons would be behind that. Yeah, so there has been, you know, he's picking up on this debate about whether it's kind of the national level policy or more the city level factors that shape an entrepreneurial ecosystem and you know I think there's some truth to that because here in the US, I'm lucky enough to be here in Silicon Valley and so obviously this Bay Area ecosystem is very unique even within the US which has the same national level policies throughout. I think the right way to think about it is that there is a complex set of factors, some of which are policy related, some of which are cultural or educational. So I think Stanford has played a particularly unique role here in the Bay Area in terms of educating a well-trained workforce of engineers and potential entrepreneurs that know both about the management issues but also about the technology and then creating this culture of openness where people are willing to share and kind of pay it forward and help one another out, you know, these cultural aspects of kind of being community-based and being very open and willing to listen to new ideas even when they come from young and experienced entrepreneurs, you know, these are also very important beyond the policies that are set and tend to be set at a more local level. And that's actually something that we've encountered in other programs as well where there's this constant difference between whether or not there are regulations as you said at a more national level and how that trickles down or if you're at civil society and you're just trying to make progress in an area that might have more economic and developmental challenges. So I think that's a fantastic point for our viewers. Yeah, this is actually an area where I've been doing a lot of research in particular. So those that are interested can check out my website, but we've been looking at both the policy-related factors and also through Startup Chile, which is an interesting initiative of the Chilean government. We've been looking at the transmission of some of these more informal cultural factors and looking at ways that we might actually be able to influence that cultural side as well. And I encourage everyone to go to Chuck's website and we'll also have a link to his presentations on our GIST Network website if you'd like to look at that after the program. So let's go to Icy Kosevo in Christina who asks, is it okay to fail or should you be thinking about the entire process clearly from the beginning? So I think what the group is asking here is that maybe you can be a bit more experimental and not have your entire model laid out at first as you're looking for customers or should you have a plan from the time that you have your idea to the time that you're going to the international market. What do you think is better? Yeah, so there's a saying that you want to avoid paralysis by analysis. And so that's the idea that rather than getting out there and trying things and experimenting, you're going to do all the analysis up front. And so I think that's really a recipe for delaying action. And as an entrepreneur, I think you've really got to have a bias towards action. And so you're never going to have everything planned out from the very beginning. And even if you do, the world is just too complex and moves too quickly. And so you certainly want to think carefully about what first experiment you're going to run and what data you're going to try to gather from that first quick and cheap small scale experiment. But you really want to be getting out there and running as many quick and easy experiments as possible. I mean this shouldn't be on the order of weeks even. This should be on the order of hours or days. So if you're just getting started with your startup, think about what's an experiment that I could run in the next two hours that would give me some actual data on the market, whether people have this problem and whether they see my potential prototype as a potential solution. So that's the kind of scale that we're talking about in terms of being adaptive, getting out there and actually running some real world experiments. So there's no pressure on entrepreneurs for a two-hour or three-hour experiment. These should be cheap and easy. If it's a two-hour experiment and you fail, that's not a disaster. It's maybe a disappointment. But if you invest months or years of your life and then you fail, that's the problem. So it's much easier to fail when it's cheap and quick. Absolutely. And it's interesting when you're talking about action. Most of our questions look at entrepreneurs as a single individual or we're speaking as though they are siloed from other members of their team. Because a successful startup, especially when you're talking about S&T, needs a bunch of other team members. You might have web designers, you might have engineers, and university systems, for example, often don't have schools interacting with each other that would form these strong teams. So this is a natural shift into my next question, which is could you tell us a little more of your research on what types of founding teams are the strongest? Yeah, definitely. So the founding team is one of the strongest determinants of the future performance of the venture. And so some of the things that we found through looking at data on thousands of startups and their eventual performance is that larger teams tend to be better performing on average. So two, three-person teams, even four-person teams, much more successful than smaller one or two-person teams. And so the first thing is to have a larger team. And part of the reason behind that is, one, there's just so much work to be done. You need the extra hands and sets of brains working on it. The second thing is that you then get a greater diversity of skills. And so there's been a lot of research showing that the greater functional diversity on the team where functions are defined as marketing, engineering, sales, finance, then that diversity of skills and diversity of information leads to greater likelihood of performance. Some of the research that I did looks at how you need to take into consideration the strategy of the startup and also the industry context that you're working in when you're thinking about these team composition matters. So in terms of strategy, if the venture is taking a very high-tech innovative strategy, so you mentioned before robotics for instance, so those types of startups are going to benefit from having a more engineer and scientist heavy founding team. And then you also need to think about the industry context that you're in. So in an area like biotech where most of the competition is to create the innovation and you're then going to partner with a larger pharmaceutical firm that's going to do the commercialization, the downstream marketing and sales, then it's also okay to have a more engineer and scientist heavy team. But if you're in an area where you really need to develop those downstream capabilities in terms of marketing and distribution, you're doing something in retail for instance, then you're much, much better off having a more functionally diverse team where you have all these different skill sets on the team. Great, and we do know that the heterogeneous teams tend to do better, so that is another important point. Jamila from Bermuda asks, what is your opinion of accelerators versus incubators to support startups and are they important to have in a developing entrepreneurial ecosystem? Yeah, yeah, so you know, accelerators and incubators are a type of organization within the startup ecosystem that provides some milestones in terms of development for the startups that are in them, but also potentially provides some mentorship and some office space. So these have become very popular in recent years and the growth has really been tremendous. You know, I think the key thing here is not to confuse the organizational form of having an accelerator or incubator with the services that are provided. So I think the key thing is, you know, having hardworking, talented people supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem and entrepreneurial community. So those functions of mentorship and of, you know, coaching startups, these are important things, but just having an accelerator, just having an incubator, particularly if it's only offering office space, is not particularly likely to lead to a successful ecosystem. Sure, and one of the other questions that we always have is that if you're looking for funding, whether the accelerators and incubators would be able to help with that aspect. Yeah, yeah, so you know, when you're looking to raise money, you have to turn over a lot of rocks and pitch a lot of people. So I think, you know, having more sources for funding and potential avenues to raise money through is very helpful, but, you know, everyone still has to be doing their job. You know, it doesn't take away the hard work that needs to be done on the part of the investors and doing due diligence on the startups that are likely to have success in the market. It doesn't take away the hard work that needs to be done on the entrepreneur side in terms of going out there running experiments, being careful to collect data, you know, finding a technology that's not just a cool technology, but that also, you know, fits some need in the market and, you know, putting together the right kind of team. So these factors are still important and, you know, if talented individuals are, you know, willing to put in the work to put together an accelerator, I think that's helpful, that keeps, you know, good people engaged in the ecosystem, but it really comes down to on a startup by startup basis, you know, doing that hard work that's involved in finding a good opportunity and then putting together an appropriate organization to pursue it. And we actually have two questions, some are related to each other about funding and also finding the right people and running the experimentations as you've been saying throughout the presentation. One of the viewers developed a new social networking platform and is looking for funding and he said how does he go about finding a venture capitalist, even in a place like Silicon Valley, and if there are other fundraising strategies you would recommend outside of what you've already asked. Similarly, I'll make it a two-part question, Gene Vanendez asks what advice you could give someone who's in one field, say ICT, who is working on a tech startup but in a different discipline. So those to go somewhat together and I was interested in your opinion on both. Yeah, yeah, sure. So the first one on fundraising, you know, I think the first thing is particularly if you're in an environment or in a region in the world where there's not a lot of venture capital or angel investment, then I think you want to try to find startup opportunities where you can bootstrap. It just is going to make things a lot easier if you can start charging money from the users or from the potential customers as a screen to whether you should pursue this kind of startup opportunity. So it's very difficult to pursue raising money outside of the region that you're living in. Most angel investors and venture capitalists like to invest locally. They can monitor the startup more easily, gather information better. So it's going to tend to be better if you can try to raise money from successful business people or angel investors or, you know, VCs if they're there locally in your environment. If they're not there locally in your environment then you've just got to screen through more startup opportunities to find ones where you can really bootstrap and start charging customers. And if you can start charging customers and actually making some money on your own then it becomes much easier to raise money. So ironically the less that you need it the easier that it becomes. So I think in that kind of region, you know, if you're having, you know, first of all you should try different revenue models, experiment to find what works, and then try to find something where you can bootstrap the venture if at all possible. The second question on startup ideas that are outside of the area of your industry expertise. So this often happens. So one of the interesting things, a former colleague, Karim Lakhani, who's now at HBS, has found that often people that solve difficult technical problems often come at it with a novel approach, and that usually means an approach from outside of the traditional industry. But everything that I said before about the importance of work experience in the industry still applies. So I think that's a case where you've really got to find some co-founders that have work experience in that industry. So it may take a bit of networking to find people who both have the relevant industry experience and who you have a shared vision and some common trust with that you could imagine, you know, working these long hours that are often the case in startups with, but that time that you spend in building the right team is really going to pay off down down the line in terms of the success of the venture. And we have heard that a lot of startups end up working from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. seven days a week. So you probably do want to like the team members that you've chosen. That's right, that's right. So it's it's a tricky trade-off. I mean on the one hand, ideally you want people that you've worked with in the past as part of your work experience, because then you know you can get through those long days and still enjoy being around this person. On the other hand, you want to, you know, look broadly enough that you're getting the diversity of skills and diversity of backgrounds that are going to make your venture more successful on average. Sure. Well, I'm going to change topics completely. We have a group called CREMA that is based in Scuola, Santa Ana, and Pisa, Italy. And they have a question about intellectual property rights, also called IPR, and appropriation strategies in web-based ecosystems. How should startups manage IPR to balance collaborative communities in competitive markets? And what they're clarifying a bit is without bearing the risk of losing their technological knowledge. And we do get this a lot is that when you find individuals, how do you know that they're not going to have their concepts stolen as they're trying to be collaborative? So if you could speak to IPR a little bit, that would be helpful. Sure, sure. Yeah, so intellectual property rights, using patents or copyright to protect your inventions. So, you know, this is a tricky thing for startups, because, you know, while it's good to apply for a patent or copyright and have that, actually enforcing it and protecting it usually requires a lot of money if you're going to actually sue someone for infringement. And so most startups don't have a lot of extra cash lying around to to be paying lawyers. And so speed to market winds up being really important. And, you know, I'd say the way to think about this, the way I tell my students, is that you're trading off two different risks. So one risk, which I think on average people tend to overweight the likelihood of, is the risk of getting your idea stolen and successfully developed by someone else. The other risk, which I think is actually much more prevalent and should be more top of mind to people, is the risk that you don't talk with enough people to sufficiently develop your idea and to rapidly enough learn about the market and learn about the true customer needs. And as I've been saying, adapt the solution and the business model to really work. So, you know, there's a tendency, I think, especially among technologists to overweight the importance of the technology and the likelihood that it's going to be stolen and to underweight all of the other aspects of the startup in terms of learning about the market, putting together the people and the organization. And so I think, you know, while you want to be careful with your technology and certainly, you know, apply for patents when appropriate and, you know, not share all of the technical details too widely, the much bigger risk is that you're not going to talk with enough people to sufficiently develop the idea and to test the market. So this is also why it's very important to run these kind of quick and easy small scale experiments. So, for instance, you know, if Jazz, if you and I were doing a startup and we were going to do another grocery delivery company, you know, one approach that we might take is that we might do a very quick and easy experiment, for instance, where we might target, you know, an office building or one residential building and we might go through and distribute flyers, you know, advertising or grocery delivery business and saying, you know, if you're interested, send an email to this address or, you know, go to this splash landing page and leave your email address there. And so we could very quickly determine, okay, there's probably 200 people in this office building and, you know, two days later, we got 50 emails. So, you know, one quarter of the people in this office building were interested in our Jazz and Chuck's grocery delivery service. Then we could go out and, you know, it wouldn't be too much work to make 50 grocery deliveries over the coming week and we'd actually have some revenue coming in. We'd be starting to bootstrap. Now that, you know, that doesn't advertise the startup idea everywhere, right? We didn't put it out there on social media. We didn't, you know, put all the details of how it works up on the web. You know, the risk of it being stolen was confined to one of those 200 people in that particular building, which is pretty unlikely. And we quickly got some feedback from the market in terms of people expressing real interest. So, that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about with, you know, a small scale, quick and easy experiment, limited in scope. You know, if it didn't work out with that particular building, we could try a different idea on, you know, building a few blocks down and no harm done. Well, if you do start a grocery delivery business, I will happily be your co-founder. I think Chuck and Chad has a nice ring to it. Absolutely. Keep me in mind. So, we have another question. Tony Chi asks, how do early startups handle risks, which you've gone into a little bit, and is plain conservatively helpful for a startup? And I think this is probably more of an emphasis of what you just described, but perhaps in some of the countries where our viewers are watching from, there's a cultural resistance to risk. And I think that might be where the question might be leading. Yeah, yeah. So, this is a great question. And, you know, the way to handle risk is to think about it in terms of uncertainty or knowledge that you don't have, and then to think about the cheapest, quickest experiment that you can run in the real world that would reduce that uncertainty. So, in the case that I was just talking about, you know, there's some uncertainty about whether there's going to be sufficient market demand for this. So, you know, risk is painful. You know, if we spent, if we spent the next year developing this great website and mobile app with all these grocery delivery technologies and, you know, working out the algorithm of how it was going to send drivers to which location at what optimal time, you know, we invest a year of our lives in all of this before launching it to those 200 people in the residential complex, then that's real risk. You know, we're risking a year of our lives, you know, potentially a lot of our own personal savings and developing it. But, you know, if we spend three days printing out some flyers and putting them up in one building, you know, it might not even take three days. It might take an afternoon. You know, then you're risking really very little and you're very quickly learning those things that were uncertain to you and that were causing the risk, right? So, once we start to get customers coming in, then that reduces the risk that there's not enough market demand to support this venture. So, I'd say, you know, the way to think about risk is turn it into very quick, very easy, small-scale experiments where you're, you know, carefully tracking some data that's going to either disconfirm your idea or that's going to provide you with some real users and some real customers to carry the idea forward. And so, if you're doing things in that kind of quick, cheap experimentation, adaptive kind of way, then risk turns out to be much less of a big deal. So, did that answer the question? Was there a second, I feel like there's a second follow-up that I forgot about? No, actually, and we're running short on time, so I want to just cover mentors before we finish for today. You focused on mentors initially as being a key success for your entrepreneurs. What was the process that your students undertook to find those mentors? Was it the same as finding team members or was there a different component? Yeah, so in the online class there's two different ways to find a mentor. So one is through the platform itself. So on the NovoEd site, a number of, we have a couple of hundred mentors that typically sign up and post a bio and students can search among them to find someone with relevant industry expertise. The other way is to search in their local communities. So I encourage people to try to think of someone who's either done a related startup or who is a business person working in a related industry in their local environment and related to what I've been talking about, these kinds of people who are a bit older and have a bit more industry experience, they've seen a lot of experiments, so to speak, having been run in the market. They might have launched related products in the same market, they've seen how that went, what worked well, what didn't work well. So this is kind of the equivalent of reading the scientific literature, so to speak, before you come up with your hypothesis for your venture. So you want to know what experiments have been run already so that you're not repeating experiments that people have already run, but you're actually running new experiments where you're going to learn new things. So I think networking in your community is a key way, and again, looking for people that have diverse ties from your own, that can bring in some novel information, and that have industry experience in the sector that your startup is working in. And I think it's really important that you emphasize that using NovoEd or other online platforms to both find resources and mentors is very good advice. Yeah, or the GIST network as well. Exactly, yeah, and on our new website, if our viewers would like to go and register on GIST, you get a whole host of mentors and peer-to-peer networks just kind of like NovoEd, and we encourage you to fill out a profile, and it is another resource that you have if it's not easy to find a local mentor. You never know what you'll come up with. So we'd like to ask a question that's very similar to having the right team members, as we spoke of before. Can you give us an example of a mentor entrepreneur relationship that led to a successful venture, or maybe on the other hand give us the reverse of this and say whether or not a mentor entrepreneur relationship was not successful in advancing the startup? Yeah, let's see, so there have been a number of successful mentor-mentee relationships from my classes. So I'm trying to think of particular examples, so Tommy Jams, who I mentioned before, Parth Saxena is an entrepreneur in India, he and his co-founder were working at Microsoft and Intel in India, they joined my online class, they wound up getting mentored by a couple of mentors, Benson Young, I think was one of them, Greg Jorgensen is another one who's been doing a lot of mentoring, and so they really credit that mentorship with helping them get to market quickly and encouraging them to, you know, really get out there, so what they were doing is basically matching up music venues with fans and bands, musical artists, and allowing the local fans to vote on which musicians they wanted to see local venues. So this has worked very well, they've expanded throughout India and also in Chile and the United States now, and so Parth, I know, really credits a lot of the mentors that he worked with through NovoEd with providing the guidance in their early market experiments and feedback on their early prototypes and helping them get to market. You know, in terms of in terms of less successful ones, you know, I think it's really a two-way street, you know, both the entrepreneur has to, you know, kind of organize their schedule around the mentor, the mentors are usually quite busy people and they want a mentor but they want this process to be an easy and enjoyable one. So the entrepreneur has got to do some things, you know, in terms of some of the feedback that I've heard from entrepreneurs, from mentors, is that they want the entrepreneur to approach with a short message that lays out specifically what they're looking for in terms of help from the mentor and then that makes it much easier for the mentors to engage and in an ideal relationship, the mentor also learns something from this, you know, they get to see what the entrepreneur is doing, you know, this new entrepreneurial idea and in the best relationships the learning really goes in both directions. So when you invest in the entrepreneur, you're really also investing in yourself. That's right, that's right, you're extending your network, you're getting to learn about new technologies, so when done well there's really benefits both ways. Great, well we have a viewing group in Globe Bermuda who wants to know with regard to teams, what is the recommended time for a development team to be committed to the startup? Yeah, so I think this is going to be shaped by the early experiments. So, you know, from the question, it sounds like they're already thinking about this in the right way and that, you know, it's great to work on a startup and what they call a moonlighting basis where you're maybe working full-time but then working on the startup in the evenings and weekends. So you want to, you know, one be careful to really clearly separate your full-time job from the startup. You want to be working on those really separately so you don't run into any problems with your employer, but it's, you know, it's great to be doing some of those initial market experiments and getting the prototype or getting, you know, some really basic form of the potential solution in front of potential users and potential customers and hopefully actually making some sales or getting some purchase orders for that potential product. Once you start, you know, getting to that point where you're actually making some money and beginning to bootstrap the startup, you know, that's obviously one point where you can decide, okay, it's time to leave a full-time job and work on this in a more committed way. If you're getting enough traction in the market in terms of accumulating users that you're able to take that to an investor and raise some money from an angel or local VC, then obviously that's going to be a point. Before an investor puts in money, they're going to want to see you working on this full-time. So, you know, once you're able to raise enough money that you have, you know, a few months to a year where you can work on this separately, then that's also a good time. But, you know, it's going to depend on the feedback from the experiments that you're doing in the market and, you know, if those are going well, then you're going to move closer to actually leaving. If those aren't going well, then you need to spend more time in this adaptation, experimentation, until you get something that is working in the market better. Great. Now, we have one last question from our viewers before we go and Chuck, I am not going to make this easy for you at all. The question is, what do you think about the current debate on, quote, disrupting the disruptive innovation model, unquote? Has disruptive innovation outlived its usefulness that you viewer asks, or is there a new model that you think will take its place? Yeah, so the way I think about this is that, you know, this is kind of what my PhD students and colleagues and I have been working on in terms of thinking about the optimal startup process, you know. So I think there are ways that people have been going about doing startups for years. And what we're really trying to do is to study that whole process and to gather some data that really shows, you know, what are the success factors early on in the life of the venture that we can show with data actually work and then what does that inform us about the startup process. So I think, you know, this is the endeavor that we're all engaged in, you know. Some of it is going to be through people from the world of practice, from industry, doing new models of accelerators or incubators. And I think the experimentation there is very important. You know, people talk about is there a bubble in accelerators. You know, there's been such growth in that area. And I think that's a sign that rather than just replicating the exact same models and another accelerator, what you want to be doing is trying to innovate on the model and, you know, trying something new, offering different services to the entrepreneurs, figuring out what problems are people encountering and finding a solution to those problems. So I think it's the same thing with the disruptive startup process. You want to figure out, you know, what real-world problems are entrepreneurs or investors encountering. And then if you can think of a new creative idea on how to solve that problem, then that's a great way to disrupt or to improve on the startup model. But to me, the whole thing really comes down to problem-solving. You know, there's got to be a real-world problem there, and if there's a potential solution, then it's worth trying a different model. And I think this idea of the disruptive approach can be a presentation in and of itself. So we'll have... That's right, we can do a whole other session. We'll do a whole other session. So we'll invite you back, Chuck, and next month we will we'll do disruption. That'd be terrific. I am going to exercise my rights as a moderator to have the privilege to ask you the same question we always ask of our guru experts, which is of everything that you discussed today, Chuck, what is the one takeaway you want our viewers to have? Yeah, so I think the one takeaway is that an adaptive approach to the startup process, when paired with the right kind of mentor that has diverse network ties from your own, is a great recipe for increasing the likelihood of a successful venture. And that's what I really try to do with my work. I want the next generation of entrepreneurs to have the greatest chances of success possible. And so hopefully some of the things that I've said about rapid, cheap and easy experimentation and being open to adaptation and forming the right kind of team around the venture will lead some of the folks who have been watching to create the next successful venture and hopefully pass along that knowledge to others. Thank you, Chuck. Well, I know that I found this to be a truly thought-provoking presentation and discussion. I am really sorry that we have to end for today, but to our viewers, we will have a link to all of Chuck's presentations and his online resources on the Just Network website. So once the presentation concludes, you can always reference it. And if you want to follow Chuck, go to his website. And then I also want to give a special thanks to the viewing groups we have in IC Kosovo and Christina, Franklin Center in Tunisia, Participants in Pisa, Italy and Bermuda and to everyone else who's viewing there around the world. I'd also like to remind viewers that our Just Tech Eye semifinalists are posted to the Tech Eye voting portion of our website and you should vote daily for your favorite semifinalist or semifinalist and also for the opportunity to win a Just Regional Startup Bootcamp which teaches entrepreneurs starting skills and gives mentors to individuals who are selected. So please start voting today and you can continue to vote until May 1st. So again, I'd like to thank you Chuck, thank you viewers and that's all we have for today. I'm Jazz Ossary saying thank, innovate and improve our world.