 My name is Joe Lim, Senior Partnerships and Innovation Officer at the World Federation of UN Associations. So after running a UN startup challenge called City Paneers for about four years, I'm proud to say that we've signed a partnership with Techstars, the global accelerator, to start and expand the effort to sharpen entrepreneurial skill sets in order to achieve the SDGs by 2030. This conference has been hugely insightful in providing reasons why we need to build businesses that create impact. Today we'll be discussing the exact area where the Rubber Mesa Road. I must say and I definitely believe that engineers are able to provide incredible breakthroughs for the associated development goals. But I won't be the first to say that not all good engineers make good entrepreneurs. We've prepared a session with the goal of equipping engineers to take the plunge with the highest rate of success possible by de-risking your product development process through a validation framework. So this morning I'm more than happy to introduce Cody Sims, Senior Vice President and the Sustainability Guru at Techstars to take us through the meat of today's workshop. Cody, the screen is all yours. Great. Well, thank you, Joe. I'm excited to be here. And I want to also welcome one of our portfolio CEOs, Meggy Williams from Skiptown. Meggy, you want to say hi real quickly? Hi, nice to be here. Awesome. So Meggy has been a practitioner of the workshop that we're going to run through multiple, multiple times. And so we thought it would be helpful for you all to hear context from her as well as someone who's actually implemented this in her team. And so really excited to be here today. Just, I guess maybe a brief introduction for those of you who aren't familiar Techstars. We're the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. We're one of the most active early stage venture investors in the world through our startup accelerator footprint. We run about 50 individual startup accelerator programs around the world each year. Each one of those programs invests $120,000 in 10 companies per year. So that's about 500 or so odd investments we're making each year around the world. So these are three month intensive sort of boot camp like programs to really help your company figure out, you know, are you pointed in the right direction and step on the gas pedal to keep going and then have a big support network of mentors and others around your business for the life of your business as you continue to grow. So you can always check us out at techstars.com and we certainly welcome any of your companies to apply just like Meggy did a few years ago. And so what we're going to do today is I'm going to show you a workshop that we do very regularly across our accelerator programs that are all about de-risking your business and figuring out the assumptions and hypotheses that you maybe still need to validate and kind of avoiding building your business on a house of cards right avoiding your build building your business on a number of things that you haven't yet proven that could ultimately results in you spending a bunch of cycles on waste for things that don't work. And so I'm going to drive through this but this is going to be a really interactive conversation between Maggie and me. Maggie you want to say a little bit about skip town just before we jump in. Yeah, sure. Thanks Cody. So I'm Maggie Williams I'm the founder and CEO of skip town. We make it easy for dogs and their parents to live their best lives when we do that through a tech enabled ecosystem and a modern country club for pups and their people. Awesome. And you can people can check that out what you want to show the URL real quick. You can just say it. It's it's it's skip town.io right. Skip town.io. Awesome. Well good well here let me share my screen and we'll go through this this presentation here. I also should say Joe we totally appreciate you logging in to introduce us at a very very early hour your time in Korea, or I should say not even early hour like middle of the night hour. So it goes to show that the world is global. Very much so and that we are all, you know we're all innovating but it can be hard to do at certain times of the day sometimes. A global world sometimes, you know requires us all to work odd hours so we really appreciate you joining us at your time. Okay, so, as mentioned this is a workshop called assumptions hypotheses and roadmaps. We've had thousands of founders go through this workshop over the over the years, and it's become one of our core pieces of content and core pieces of curriculum as you're going through tech stars. And so really the goals here are to understand the key assumptions in your business to rank order the assumptions that are critical to test, and so rethink how road mapping is done. And, and so I guess maybe maybe you want to just before we even dive into what this how this works, maybe you want to talk a little bit about how you all have used it at a very high level and what how it's been useful to your leadership team. Yeah, sure. So I've run through this workshop twice with Cody as a participant as a as a as a CEO and I've run through it with my leadership team, probably half a dozen times we do it every quarter. The first time that I did this workshop we were a dog walking company had about 100 employees and we operated across three markets through different cities. The last time one of the last times we did this workshop we had shut down our dog walking service and two of those markets and we had just launched a 24,000 square foot dog bar park and pet care facility same company same team. But we made this pivot, because we learned something very important. And what we learned was how and why we needed to reassess the core assumptions on which we were operating, and we did that through this exercise that's what this workshop does. And I'm excited to be here to talk through it because it has been so invaluable to our business and to get us to where from where we were to where we are today. We would not exist as a company if we had continued down the path we were on and it was because of a lot of the things that we were blinded by that, you know by doing this workshop allows you to just kind of pick your head up and see the real a real a real a reality, then maybe what you operate under right now. That's great and I think that the last thing before we dive in that I'll add is, you know, there are there are oceans and oceans of content out there on product. Product process right, are you going to use scrum or you're going to use agile like how are you going to do this is not that at all. This is not a process workshop. This is a prioritization workshop which is very different, and it's really much more about kind of quickly building a sorting mechanism to help you understand what things you know and what things you don't know. So let's let's dive in and I did get a comment that someone commented on my Jordan ones in the background. I just want to say these were my, these were my dad's these were like from 1985 so I hold them very preciously. So thanks for over notice that. You know, a couple things, if you're going to do this one thing to consider is are you together are you remote obviously in this time of COVID-19 mini as many of us are remote. This workshop is written as though you are doing it together in a room with sticky notes, where you're putting things down and then putting them on a whiteboard, but if you're remote, there are a couple of virtual whiteboarding tools that I highly recommend. One is called mural.com and one is called mural.co. They're similar in function, but both allow teams to collaborate remotely with sticky notes on a virtual whiteboard. So if you are remote and want to try to do this afterward. Check out one of those platforms they're both, they both have free plans so you can you can use them in a lightweight way just for this type of exercise. Also, this is not an exercise to do by yourself. This really is important for you to gather input from different team members and I think you'll see why as we go but maybe maybe you want to represent a little bit about, you know, why it matters to get the input from your team as you do this, as opposed to, you know, you just doing it as the CEO yourself. So I think what makes this work, this workshop work is doing it collaboratively with your team because I think what you find is is that everybody's reality is different. And a lot of times your role determines your perspective. And if you work in a team, you, you probably know that already. And when you bring everybody together who has very strongly held beliefs, hopefully passionate strong beliefs but that can be persuaded once you have new information and that's what this workshop does is it gives everybody a chance to really have new information come together on it really talk through it to really understand what's the most important the most critical thing about your business to your business why your business exists, or whatever you're doing your project exists like what your what your common aim is. I don't get that if you do it siloed. And I think that, yeah, so I think doing it with a team, or with the people that you work with is absolutely critical to getting the value out of out of this prioritization workshop. Great. So diving in. We jump in with this workshop with very little direction. Founders who've never done this before come and they get this first slide, which is me just saying start working. The first request is write down on as an individual exercise not as a team on a per sticky note basis, things that you believe drive your business right and that's a very broad statement and it's intentionally vague. I encourage founders and companies to think about things like their product plans their tech plans their hiring plans their go to market strategies and really take about 10 minutes and just rapidly write down as many of these types of belief statements as they can. So this is, this is a volume play not an accuracy play because you're wanting to just get as many thoughts down on paper as possible. And so, got a couple examples here, not from one company but just a bunch of random hypothetical belief statements. Things like I believe the primary channel for customer acquisition will be through organic content marketing, or I believe, you know the fear of climate changes influencing where people decide to purchase their first home. Or I believe we should launch our product via university campuses starting in the Midwestern us right so these are the things that either you've already been trying to work on or on your roadmap to go figure out. And, and you know your goal here is to jam if you can get you know if you can write like one of these every 30 seconds over 10, over 10 minutes, you've got 20 and then if you've got four other teammates doing this to end up with 80 belief statements that are your, your canvas for starting this workshop. And you know, I mean, maybe I'd love to, I guess maybe flipping to the next slide like one thing I always ask founders after they do this is, how was it was it harder to get started was it harder to stop. Did you end up going down a single path like I'm going to write a bunch of belief statements about customer acquisition, or do you kind of go broadly across the business, and just I guess you know any feedback you've had as you run this with new members of your team who haven't done this before like this the first step can kind of feel confusing at first for people, but the feedback I give founders is that's like starting a business like you don't have no one's giving you the directions, you've got to kind of hear a little bit about what you think you do and then, and then, you know, figure it out as you go. And that's that's the goal here as well as that you'll refine this as you go but curious to hear, you know your thoughts about how team members have gone through this first step. I think the first time we did it it was absolutely uncomfortable because there's so many questions that you want answers to about how to move forward and you, you want to kind of create the rules before you play the game. And in this scenario you really just got to you just got to put stuff out there to Cody's point, you know, it's, it's quantity over quality. That's kind of the premise of just brainstorming in general right is you, you want the good ideas will come once you, you know, are putting everything you've got out there. And it does feel uncomfortable because you don't know if you're too granular if you're too broad if you're, if you're too specific in a certain area, but, and I think you just need to work through that and come and really write down whatever comes to mind because usually whatever's coming to mind is really how you're operating is really what you're believing if you can, you know, if you can let yourself stop from overthinking. You'll get to the, the truths that you operate on on a daily basis and that's, I think, and that's really what you want. And, and, you know, come later stages when you come back to come together with us on the team. It gets easier because it becomes more collaborative but at this stage, you know, just embrace the discomfort that will likely, you know, happen when you're trying to come up with these ideas and you're not sure exactly where to start or how to finish it. Sure. And I would say too, if you're doing it in a virtual setting, like if you're using Miro.com, you're all on the same screen together and you're kind of seeing each other right. But again, I encourage you in this very first step to do it individually. So, you know, each of you pick a little corner and put your sticky notes in the corner but don't talk through them because the goal is the more you talk through them at this first stage, the more you're likely to kill brainstorm ideas, right, because you try to develop consensus and that's not what you want to do here you want to get every idea on paper that people have. You know, it could be a pet project it could be something that other people think is crazy whatever get it on paper because it's going to get sorted through this exercise. So, step one, take 10 minutes right as many stickies as you can about things that drive your business. And then you actually go through and you look at each of the stickies as a team and this can take a while if you have 80 stickies like, you know, that could I mean I give you 15 minutes here in my workshop but sometimes teams are nowhere near done but after 15 minutes. You want to go through look at all the stickies talk through them together. If there are some that just feel duplicative you can kind of pool them together pick one that's representative of the bunch. And then the important step here is if you have data to back up a belief. This is an engineering panel so hopefully everyone appreciates the value of data. I want you to draw a big star on the sticky. Right so, and the guidelines for this are are really two things. One, do you have some kind of internal dashboard that shows this data somehow it doesn't have to be 100% accurate but you know whether it's Google analytics dashboard whether it's your sales pipeline whether it's your customers CRM whether it's your customer service logs, whatever that may be if you have some kind of intuitive data in your company that says this thing and the sticky is true draw a star. Or if you've talked to enough customers where you genuinely know this feedback to be true at least according to that segment of customers you've talked to draw a star on that you might want to, you know, make that start make that sticky a little specific to, based on these customer types or whatever it is you've talked to you but if you have a dashboard or if you've talked to enough customers draw a star, and then the rubric that I ask founders to go through is, would you wager me $100 that I'd agree that this should have a star on it. Right and so that's a that's meant to represent a very specific request which is. This is not like overthink it so much that you're betting the whole company on this it's like you know $100 $100 is a big bet but it's not, you know you're not betting your company's life on it. And but it's also not so casual that you're just going to star everything like it needs to be like yeah I bet 100 bucks that this that someone would say I agree that there's data here. Anything you guys have come across when you're kind of trying to do this initial data step that that founders struggle with or that you know is is is where the kind of identifying where the challenges may come up here for people. Yeah, I mean I think this is one of the most important parts of setting up this exercise correctly to be able to get the value on out of it, and it is so easy and there's a tendency to want to believe that what you know is true. And for us to Cody's point would you wage your $100 it's it's making it's being really tough on yourself. The goal here is not to feel good about all the things that you're saying, you know for sure. The goal is to really understand what you possibly don't know, or don't know to the fullest extent. And so the way our team does it is when we be sitting around kind of going through the matter we've gotten rid of the duplicates. We'd look at the sticky notes and if we'd say okay have we validated this market size for instance we'd be like okay like wow. If there was even a pause if anybody did the like the sound. We would put it into unvalidated so really, really be conservative about when you're when you're going through this and what you're starring, because a lot of times you want something to be true. But back to Cody's point, if you if you if your life depended on proving that you had the data, would you be so sure. Yeah, and, and I think. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, a big thing we preach at tech stars is intellectual honesty and I think this is this is what Maggie just said is that right which is, don't lean into what you hope to be true leaning into what you actually know to be true for this specific market size and be hard on yourselves about those questions. So that's that's sort of step two, you create all these sticky notes, you go through them all to talk through them. If you have data to back up a belief you draw a star on them, and then you go and then you know what I like to do is also debrief with the founders like after you did this. Did you notice differences in how each of you approached even the first exercise like I often find it interesting that like a CEO maybe really focused broadly across the business and then, you know, a product had a product maybe focused really tangibly on customer feedback on the business, and, you know, your head of sales maybe really focused on, you know, sort of pricing and your head of marketing oftentimes maybe really focused on, you know, on customer acquisition and like but that's great like that's where you get the diversity of sticky notes so I'm curious, you know, any experiences you've had with that, Maggie. So you do get that diversity in how not just what people come up with on the sticky notes but how people think through this question. And I would just say that after what now that we've done this a couple times, many times it pay attention to that. There's a lot of value and understanding how other people in your company on your team on a project think, and seeing what they go to and what you go and what you gravitate to is also a point of discussion that can like lead to you know just just a good side conversation and I think that there's a lot of value to that as well. And I think to Cody's point. And at least what we operate is that there's no right or wrong answer with how you approach that, but it is informative to know the, the, the mind frame the framework that people put around these kind of questions, because it really does define the reality that people hold when they're approaching this project and it's and it's good for people to understand kind of, you know, what other people's framework is, and this, and this helps tell that. And I would say the last thing and you kind of hinted at this a minute ago was, there's no right or wrong answer on how many stickies you have with stars, you could have, and you could have, you know, one sticky with star or you could have 40 stickies with stars and you know it's really it's where are you in this phase of product development as a business right so if you know and I've seen incredibly mature companies, but they're on a new product. They're having almost no stickies with stars almost no data. And I've seen companies that are still in the early stage cycle but they have one product and it's very simple and they've learned a lot about it and you know that they're able to star quite a few things. So again, you know, your ebb and flow in your company's lifetime and you mentioned this to Maggie like you guys went through this pivot where you knew a lot about the dog walking business and then you decided to move to the physical location space and didn't know anything about that and so, your walking business was quite mature. You know, as you were doing this, I'm guessing when you moved into the physical events business, the physical space business for skip town. You were starting from scratch. Yeah, no correct. And we, you know, we knew a lot about the dog walking business, but we knew more than we were acting on, and you know it goes back to what I think this whole workshop on covers just confirmation bias is that you can live your life on in any in any capacity, kind of living off assumptions that you that you're, you know, you don't necessarily have data to back and that's what this is starting this is what's starting to uncover and this point in it. But yeah, I mean I think one of the reasons we moved away from the dog walking business, we had a lot of information, but there was some critical pieces of information that we weren't seeing and that would have let us down a pretty critically fatal path if we had continued. And by kind of realizing that calling those things out, gave us the courage to make different decisions. And if anything, I think this what you get out of this workshop is courage, because some of the things that you learn can be scary. If you when you dig deep things that you thought were true that may not be awesome. Okay, great. And then. So then the next exercise you do so you've got all these stickies. What I asked you to do is move only to the stickies with stars. So you're going to only look at the subset of stickies that you in the previous previous step decided to validate the ones you put stars on said yes we have data for that. I want you to look only at those. And these are your validated assumptions these are things you believe to be true about your business that drive your business and you have data that actually supports that this the statement you wrote is true. What I want you to do is when you're looking just at that subset. I want you to just the subset of validated assumptions. Now I want you to decide which ones of these do you think are most critical to your business so this is different than do we have data is this true this is are these things actually really critical to the business. So who now trying to get consensus among your team of all the drivers which ones of those drivers are the most important specifically of the set where you already know that they actually are true. So, of your stickies with stars, which ones are most critical to your business, and then I want you to draw a circle on those. And so the way I want you to do this is to really think in extremes, I want you to not think about, you know how critical is it right now I want you to think about how critical is this as the business hit scale, like if this thing really is true to the utmost extreme is this going to drive our business to the moon, or is if this thing, like for whatever reason stops working or isn't true, or we mess it up, is it going to drive our business straight into the ground. So thinking those massive extremes at scale. And when the answer to that is yes for either of those questions draw circle so you'll end up with a handful of stickies that have both a circle and a star. Maybe anything you want to add to kind of the step of this, this sort of criticality phase and figuring out which ones are your top assumptions of importance. Only that if you're working on this with other people who are represent different departments. This does become. You have to really align to what is the most important, and you know people who feel when you're invested in what you do, you feel ownership over that and you want what you do to be the most important to be the top assumption. And depending on how granular you go with the sticky notes that those questions come up, and people have to be willing to agree on what is a top validated assumption or a top assumption, and it might not be what they're particularly working on and I think that creates very productive and can create such a constructive dialogue. But for us that that's always, you know, a really fun and challenging part of this exercise is to align on what the top assumptions are. Because, you know, if you if you run the tech department, the most important thing maybe that you know that the technology is functional and that people will be using technology and that will be, you know, how we go into the future. And if you're running operations it could be totally different top about a deception so I would, I would just say think about that when you're going into it and make it a learning across, you know the whole group. Okay cool so we do that and then you know basically. You know I usually ask founders to think you know what was this easier hard were you aligned or are there things where you didn't agree and make you sort of talked about that a little bit and you know sort of the empathy of understanding and appreciating the, you know the perspectives of different teams and giving them the floor to make sure they're able to fully articulate what's going on in their department or from their experience with this thing. So you know I just ask how many how many do you select for circles and again the answers are always all over the map some companies will only have a handful some will have a lot and there's no right or wrong answer this is about you getting the data for your business. And so from from there, we kind of do the same step. So you look at all of your stickies without stars. So these are all the things originally that you said you didn't have data for right these are your unvalidated assumptions these are the things that you believe to be drivers of your business you believe we're going to move the needle about your business, but you actually don't have the data. So this is truly an assumption or a hypothesis at this point. And so I want you to do the exact same exercise you did before, but I want you to do it for the ones that, again, you don't have the data for go through and decide which of those are critical. And this is really tricky, because you don't have the data so you are making a gut call here, which is the one time in this exercise I asked you to make a true gut call of all of your unvalidated which ones are most likely to, again, take your business to the moon or drive you to the ground, based on what you all collectively feel. And so this, again, this is more this is a feeling one and I love, you know, I find the companies somehow magically tend to figure this out, like it's kind of obvious once you're once you have all these stickies which ones really feel the same, but, but you know, any insights on on how you have navigated this part of it, make it be awesome. No, I think that, you know, if you run companies you operate on gut a lot. So I think this ends up being a little bit of a more natural part of the exercise is to be able to make quick calls, and, you know, depending on your team and totally depends on your team. But I would agree that this, you know, comes the fastest probably in my experience for the people that I've done this with. Great. That's awesome. And do you do you end up do you ever get ones where you're stuck where you're like you can't get alignments or or whatnot and like and if so you know this is maybe a cultural thing for your company how do you ultimately make the call. And we operate with a lot of. We try to make it a culture of constructive disagreement. So people are used to dissension in the, in the sense that you know you can have a perspective and not agree, but ultimately we try to come to an agreement we try to come to an understanding of calling and people know that's the end point. So I would be interested in Cody how you would recommend people move forward when they feel like they're at a stalemate. For us we always drive toward getting kind of an answer on where you know what pilot goes to but I could also understand where people would just get so locked into being like no I truly believe it goes here, and someone disagrees. What would you say to do in that scenario. Yeah what I've seen work is actually to collectively rewrite the sticky and sometimes it's to break it into two. So sometimes it's to take a sticky and you know reframe it and you know maybe there was one part of the language that someone was held up on or you know it was it was too vague or you know some of them sometimes again different people in the company are doing this at different levels. And with step one no one had done this before so everyone's kind of learning as they go. Sometimes the stickies just need to be tweaked to rewritten and then you can usually do that and get to a point where you believe. That's the other thing I would add as you're going through this exercise. You'll also often and I'm sure this happens to you all, you know, you'll often also uncover new things that in discussion you're like oh man we should write that down and that's totally cool like right down put it put it put it on the board and add it to your list. You can start or circle it or both as appropriate. But I find that the discussions and brings up new insights like that that are actually really helpful. And it's totally cool to reframe the sticky notes as you go. If you all decide that, you know, rewording makes the most sense for your business. So then, you know, same thing, you know just really encourage you to debrief for a minute after you do this, you know, were you aligned where the ones you didn't, you know, didn't agree how many do you have for circles, etc. And that's sort of the workshop itself. It you know at the end you end up with these four and I know that was confusing circle stars blah blah blah but at the end you end up with these four piles of stickies and hopefully this brings it together. Right you've been that you end up on the on the left left quadrant with your high priority unvalidated assumptions, the top right quadrant with your high priority validated assumptions these have the circle and the star. The left is your low priority unvalidated that are essentially still blank, and your bottom right are your low priority validated that have a star but no circle. And so you can then move your stickies into these little buckets. One thing I do see a lot of companies tend to do as well as they'll actually, and this isn't part of my instructions but I love it when people go this path. Once throughout this phase, they'll then start to try to bucket the stickies by theme. So like these are our marketing assumptions or these are our product assumptions or these are our customer acquisition assumptions or what not to it's just, you know, it's a little bit even more kind of further refinements of the model. But you know you end up with this list of stuff, and then from there, you can actually use this to help you make decisions as a business. And so I'm going to give you my thesis on how you can do this and then let's hear from maybe on how you have companies actually do this. Now the thesis I have is that the high priority unvalidated the high priority validated assumptions the things that are a circle with a star. These are things that are ready for you to actually spend product cycles on. You believe these are important your business that you have data that says they're important, and you decided that of those these are some of the most critical things you can do. You should be cranking on the stuff and of course you got to you know send individual features through feature validation but these are areas where your company should be focused now. The high priority unvalidated assumptions where you have a circle and no star. To me, these are the most important things that come out of this exercise, because these are the things that you have deemed to be critically important to your business, but that you don't actually know. And so this is that whole like you could be building on a house of cards here with this stuff. And so my advice is this is the area where you should spend a ton of time prioritizing for customer discovery. You know feedback interviews for user research usability studies, whatever it may be sales validation, you need to go out and figure this stuff out before you spend a bunch of engineering and product cycles building in this area because it could end up being huge amounts of waste. And then this is obviously overly simplistic but the bottom areas that both buckets of low priority. My advice is just ignore as much of that as you can so you can focus on the top things. So I'm curious how you all actually deal with this in practice because I know this is like the theoretical layout of this but you know anytime you're building a company everything's more complicated than the theoretical view. Yeah. Yeah, so when we did this workshop the first time we found out that a lot of the assumptions that we had that were critical to the business to our dog walking business. We just didn't have data around them. A lot of them centered on market size and the ability to generate new clients at the right acquisition costs to really support scaling the operations we had built. But only was a product market fit problem and you know we were operating on data that was anecdotal data that was anecdotal, but was supporting these critical assumptions that was kind of all moving us toward a certain path. You know, at that point when we when we skipped that out and we saw the unvalidated high priority assumptions we knew we had some homework to do. So we went back and we created a plan to go get that data and go really like put a new lens on how we were seeing what we knew and believe was core to the success of this certain business that we were running. And we know we came back and we came back to the table after doing that and we realized that we had, we, you know, we were very excited because we felt like we now had the foundation to make different decisions that we knew ultimately were going to fundamentally change the direction of the business. And I, you know, I guarantee that if you're part of a team that your team is operating off of different assumptions that you all believe to be true and some you might have data and some important ones you might not. And it's, you know, it's, it's a gravity creating experience to all at the same time, see that together. And then think about well where do we go from here and for me and for us that's always and that's, you know, that's always the most exciting thing is to be able to say okay now we know this. What concepts do we take to move it forward and in our case we completely pivoted our business we shut down most of the core product service that we were offering, and we expanded into a whole new direction, because of the learnings of this workshop. And that's why we do it every quarter. Yeah, and I've got, I've got a couple, you know, I've got multiple portfolio companies like you who do this on a regular basis and use it as a leadership planning exercise. You know, I also I personally run a nonprofit called climate change makers, which is a whole political action group around climate change. If you're interested in that check us out at climate change makers.org. We run through this as well ourselves as our own company so I kind of brought my leadership team through this workshop. And similarly we came into this sort of thinking like our assumptions were all about community growth and growing the community and what we what we ultimately ended up realizing based on this exercise is that our prioritization there was a little bit off. And that, you know, really our focus should be on community health and community engagement. And, you know, how we drive community diversity community retention and ultimately community community longevity and so, you know, this exercise really helped us shift our priorities as well. So, you know, I can speak from it a little bit as a, you know, as someone who's gone through it once or twice myself in addition to who's led the workshop lots of times. And then, you know, a lot of the reason for this I'm going to go through this last part really quickly but basically product development has changed so much like we've gone from a world where, you know, we used to build products in these crazy waterfall ways. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time and I started way back in the late 1990s, used to write these crazy documents called a product requirements document which was this like 30 page list of features that you wanted to go build, you would have, you know, engineering sign off and marketing sign off and whatever, and then engineering to build it and then you would ship it and you know that would be this like flow chart process. Obviously not how product is built today we all live in a world of agile or lean startup or scrum and we're running backlogs and burning down through the great thing about agile and lean startup and kind of modern product development process is it gives you incredible granularity on what you're working on right now. But it's really hard to plan what you should be working on three months from now, six months from now, where the vision of the company is going. And so, I find that this workshop can help you set a framework for where you should be focused. But this is where I sort of think roadmaps as they exist today are somewhat broken. You know, I think a roadmap as a sacred blueprint about what you're going to be doing a year from now is ridiculous like no company knows what they're going to be doing a year from now. And so what I see is a lot of founders changed, but you have to have a roadmap you need one to go raise money you need one for your team members to know what you're working on what the priorities are you need one for your board members if you have one to know what you're working on. And so I see a lot of founders try to pivot the roadmap into an aspirational plan this is what we're going to try to do. But even then, like you're saying that oftentimes very much unrooted in data or reality of like knowing what you're aiming toward down the road. So my big sort of thing I like to advocate for something I call a learning roadmap, which is rather than making it very super feature oriented like here's what we're building nine months from now which is basically a ridiculous thing to try to claim as a startup. It's much more about what are we going to learn over the next little while. I haven't heard people say and I tend to agree with this that you really only know what you're actually working on for about two months out two to three months out and anything beyond that is kind of let's see where the world goes. And so trying to create a roadmap that shows what you're building a year from now is a false premise, but showing the roadmap that says by two quarters from now we want to have learned this about our business or by three quarters from now we want to have learned that about our business and prioritized accordingly gives you a view on on how to show where the future is headed without committing to like little granular features that are going to set your team or your investors or others. False expectations of what you're actually going to be delivering. I mean, let me know does I resonate with you to Maggie like do you all do anything like that at all or is that just me and sort of ivory tower land. I think and what we add on to that is how, what do we need to fail at to get those learns. And I think this was something that was also really powerful from from this exercise is is really leaning into failure as a as a positive thing. So how do you go out and test and learn and use that as feedback that drives, you know, future decisions. And, and when you think about like what what do I want to learn. It's also like what am I, what do I need to fail that to learn it. And so when we think about it in that way, failure becomes so much less of it because it doesn't become negative anymore becomes like, what do we need to do to break this to to realize something else. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, I think oftentimes it's just the difference of saying, you know, it's a semantics thing of saying, you know, we're going to focus on what we're shipping as opposed to we're going to focus on what we're learning. And, you know, the last thing I'll leave you all with on this regard is, I don't think hope is a strategy. And I think if you don't have data you only have hope. And so I also don't think you want to be in analysis paralysis where you don't actually do anything you just collect data, you've got to find that middle ground, but you want to make informed decisions so you're not jumping off a ledge every time you try to do something. Because goodness knows if you jump off a ledge, like, hopefully you're a good base jumper but you know, sometimes the shoot may have problems. So we want to make sure that when you're jumping you're actually ready to catch an up drift. And, you know, that's that's sort of our workshop for today and we'd love to spend a few minutes here if folks have questions. They could be questions about the exercise they can be questions about Maggie's business skip town maybe questions about tech stars. We did get one question at the very beginning someone asked me if tech stars is live in Egypt. We don't have an accelerator program in Egypt that we have a very active startup weekend community in Egypt. So, you know, if you want to go. So if you can check out startup weekend, which is an organization of tech stars. It's, it helps you at the, you know, sort of very beginnings of your business spend, spend about 72 hours sort of figuring out is, what does it even mean to build a startup, but we do have quite a few other accelerators in the region. We have a program in Abu Dhabi. We have a program in Tel Aviv. I think those are two in the region there, but with potentially more on the way. So let's see we have another question. Joe asks, what are some mistakes entrepreneurs make most often when validating their data. You want to take this Maggie. Yeah, so something that's very important about all this is what we talked about it a little bit but what is that what is validated data. Right. And that's a whole conversation of itself is how do you source data that you can rely on and I would say that is one of the biggest right and I, we go after, you know, the industry leading reports, you know, that have been credit and they're credible that are validated IBIS, you know, industry leading reports specifically in our field that have, you know, that's have some validation because it's very easy to just go into Google and start typing and find articles and use that and you just have no idea the, the, you know, the agenda behind some of that or who's financing it, and it can really change the message and then the other so and Cody I would also, you know, think you should jump in here and talk about validated data as well. And the other thing I would say is how you perceive data so you could have really credible data but you just read it wrong or differently. And so I think, you know, how you are depending on how that great that data is being presented and how you are then perceiving and internalize it is also can also fit your story can fit a confirmation bias if you want it to. I think those are two really important things and I think if you have a team around it that goes back to why this is so important not to do by yourself. And it's so important to create that that culture of questioning and asking and reassessing because you know we've done that exercise and we've had people be like I don't think that's I don't think that data says that I don't. I think we have a discussion around it so I do think having more people in the room more perspectives in the room to kind of call that out will help true, true your, your, your baseline for, you know, accurate data, and how you're proceeding it. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the, I totally agree with that one of the things that I, you know, I really emphasize first party data, right I really emphasize using your data you've been able to gather for validation right so whether again that's data from one of the other boards or, you know, data you've been collecting or customer insights that you have that are proprietary to you. I don't, I'm not a big believer in using a big, you know, heavy amount of like third party reports, I'm definitely not a big believer in using data source because that's what our competitors are doing. Because your competitors maybe, you know, just as, as uninformed as you were around what the market wants and maybe they've taken a leap of faith and you know you're going to jump off a blind leaf of faith with them which is not what you want to do. So again, I really emphasize the first party data sources. Let's see we have another question. Oh, I got a text source question so what services do text source provided startups that go through your program do you help with financing. Absolutely so tech stars. Actually, let me let me let me let you answer this because you've been through tech stars so what is tech stars provided for you. So tech is provided a lot so I went through the program in 2018. And so that was a fully immersive, you know, we were, we had nine other companies in our cohorts we got to do them really well. We went through workshops just like this, I would say offhand another dozen of them that were also led by industry experts with just just such incredible experience across the board that actually traveled around to deliver these workshops. And on a whole host of topics but we're really fundamental to do this, I think the success of any great any business that has the potential to be great. And that and then the most valuable thing for me is as as I continue to be an alum and supporter of the program and involved in many ways has been the network and the people, and the give first mentality that Cody I know you can talk to at length but for me was just permeated not just within my time at tech stars but it's something that I've definitely taken with me and has been something that I have gotten back 10x. And just it is a very involved and supportive community of high achieving people who want others to, to win, and don't think that someone else's when is their loss and that mentality is just is really hard to find. It's been a privilege to be a part of a group of people that just so strongly believe that. And then not only that but tech stars mentors came into one of our funding rounds so we have tech stars as an additional investor, and just a constant resource. Awesome. Let's see we probably have time for one more question. We had one that came in asking about what are good references or resources for validation processes. There was another one about stagegate process which I have to admit I'm not familiar with so I'm sorry I don't unless unless you are maybe I don't know how to answer that question. I have not used that methodology though. I'll definitely go read more about it. I have a question about resources or references for validation process. I would definitely point you to, there's a software planning tool called product plan. And they've got a really nice blog about product stuff. And so I'd encourage you to follow their, their blog and they do a lot of discussions around this type of work, which is a good resource I rely on. I think that may be it for our questions I think Joe you wanted to you're going to come back in and we're going to do a little wrap up with some really exciting news about about sustainability and some of the work we're doing together. And I want to make you want to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to help us out and provide your insights I think it's so much more valuable for the panelists to hear from someone who's been doing this, then just to hear me talking to everybody so thank you so much. Thank you it's great to be here. Hope that helps anyone with a dog check out skiptown.io. Right, a very big applause and thank you Cody for going into the super helpful details of how we can base our company's decisions over things we can validate. The engineers listening here today are more like more than happy to be able to tell their CEOs that they need that data to validate their thinking and decisions. And I'm Maggie thank you also so much for adding flesh to the conversation and grounding us in a to a real context throughout the process. I'm definitely announcing to my team on Monday that we're going to have a 90 minute the recent session coming up at the end of the week. All right, I think I think our time is almost up so I'd like to extend my gratitude to the, to the 40 or so participants who took interest in our talk. You know, if you're moving on to the next program make sure to check out the tech stars and the city premier's virtual booth tech stars and with FUNA are together, preparing a tech star sustainability challenge. And as gracefully put a link for us. Yeah, in the chat. And we're looking for startups that make, you know supply chains sustainable and final deadline is March 31 2021 application application is open already. You know, please check out the link that you can find on in the chat box. And I think I think that's pretty much it. And, you know, Cody is showing us the details of this challenge. There's there's two aspects of it one is data and automation the seconds materials and end of life impact I don't think we have the time to go into all the details about the challenge just here so please take your time to to visit us in the link below. And again, many thanks for participating in the tech stars and Mufuna assumptions and hypothesis the risking workshop. Thank you impact engineers and their staff. Mariella and Lily who graciously invited us to this event and made this workshop possible. And I hope everyone has a great lunchtime. Thank you again everyone. Goodbye.