Q&A With the Father of the Lean Startup

Which are the best business schools for entrepreneurship?

Berkeley got it in a second. Columbia got it in a second. Harvard gets it, but they have to rename everything. The good news is they teach students the concepts. The bad news is those students have no idea what language everybody else is speaking. Then there’s the third group: Screw-you-you’re-wrong that says, ‘No, we’re not changing our curriculum.’ I respect that, too, because we can have an interesting conversation. The worst version, and I’ve seen this in another East Coast school, adds the new methodology on top of the old one. They’re checking all the possible boxes but not really understanding that they have to make an intellectual break. I think that does damage.

The faculty that get it are the ones who started companies. Why am I teaching at Stanford? The president of Stanford was an engineer and entrepreneur. Why am I teaching in the engineering school and not the business school? The guy who heads up the entrepreneurship program in the engineering school was an entrepreneur.

The joke is that the last people on earth to get it will be business school professors. But if you’ve ever been a practitioner, the minute you sit through a demo day, you go, ‘Boy, this is what we’ve been missing!’

How should business schools teach entrepreneurship in your opinion?

We made the mistake of thinking that we were teaching entrepreneurship in business school like we were teaching finance, investment banking or management. It turns out that the closest career to being a founder is an artist. I’m talking about founders, not early employees. Founders actually see and hear things that other people don’t. Founders create something out of nothing. Founders do things out of passion and vision. In fact, founders require passion and vision because most of the time life is shit if you’re a founder. It’s mostly people saying no. It’s mostly impossible odds.

Who else creates something out of vision and passion? Artists, composers, and sculptors. Where most people would have seen a huge block of marble, Michelangelo saw the Pietà. And when you asked him how he did it? He said I just removed the stone around it. Classic!

I’m a founder. I always kept my eye on the goal–everything else was just a f’ing obstacle. But when you talk to normal people, all they saw were the obstacles. Trying to teach those types of people with the same educators who teach accounting just doesn’t match. So we made a mistake thinking that an entrepreneurship curriculum is closer to business school or engineering school. I contend that it’s closer to art school.

Yes, it’s theory, but there’s a ton of experiential hands on. Where do we do that in universities? We do it in music schools, we do it in theater, we do it in medical school, but we don’t do it in business school.

So an entrepreneurial curriculum done my way would involve a ton of theory, but also a ton of practice. No one would be embarrassed and say that’s trade school. Now, if you try to practice in a traditional business school, you’ll get, ‘We don’t do that, that’s trade school.’

To what extent can you actually teach entrepreneurship?

Friends who knew me as an entrepreneur would laugh hysterically when they found out I was teaching. They’d say, ‘Steve, you know you can’t teach this.’ I really pondered this for a long time: Why did I think you could teach this? And I realized we were asking the wrong question. Let me reframe the question: Who can you teach entrepreneurship to? And the answer is to those who actually want to learn it.

It’s like being a brain surgeon. It’s not just technique. You’ve got to really want to be a surgeon. You’re going to be working your ass off as much as you would in a startup. Or like signing up for the Delta Force in the Marines; it’s so far above and beyond the standard path that you really have to want it. There is a set of things in life that you have to be passionate about, where you can’t just show up for class. This is one of them.

Some of my classes require an application and interview, and every once in a while I’ll turn a team down. Nearly 100% of the time they’ll chase me out to the parking lot fighting to get in. If it’s the wrong team, they’ll just say okay and walk away.