Steve Blank: Stanford’s Lean LaunchPad 2024: 8 Teams In, 8 Companies Out

We just finished the 14th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions.

During the quarter, the eight teams spoke to 919 potential customers, beneficiaries and regulators. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class.

In the 14 years we’ve been teaching the class, we had something that has never happened before: All eight teams in this cohort have decided to start a company.

A REVOLUTION IN TEACHING ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Several government-funded programs have adopted this class at scale. The first was in 2011 when we turned this syllabus into the National Science Foundation I-Corps. Errol Arkilic, the then head of commercialization at the National Science, adopted the class saying, “You’ve developed the scientific method for startups, using the Business Model Canvas as the laboratory notebook.”

Below are the Lessons Learned presentations from the spring 2024 Lean LaunchPad.

---

Team Neutrix – Making Existing Nuclear Reactors More Profitable By Upgrading Their Fuel

Click here to see the Neutrix Presentation.

I-Corps at the National Institute of Health

In 2013 I partnered with UCSF and the National Institute of Health to offer the Lean LaunchPad class for Life Science and Healthcare (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health.) In 2014, in conjunction with the National Institute of Health, I took the UCSF curriculum and developed and launched the I-Corps @ NIH program.

Team Virgil – Capturing Memoirs of Loved Ones (and Using AI to Do It Profitably)

Click here to see the Virgil Presentation.

I-Corps at Scale

I-Corps is now offered in 100 universities and has trained over 9,500 scientists and engineers; 7,800 in 2,546 teams in I-Corps at NSF (National Science Foundation), 950 participants at I-Corps at NIH in 317 teams, and 580 participants at Energy I-Corps (at the DOE) in 188 teams.

Team Claim Pilot – Overturning Denied Healthcare Claims

Click here to see the Claim Pilot Presentation.

$4 Billion in Venture Capital For I-Corps Teams

1,380 of the NSF I-Corps teams launched startups raising $3.166 billion. Over 300 I-Corps at NIH teams have collectively raised $634 million. Energy I-Corps teams raised $151 million in additional funding.

Team Emy.ai – Using Brainwaves to Biohack Moods

Click here to see the Emy.ai Presentation.

Mission Driven Entrepreneurship

In 2016, I co-created both the Hacking for Defense course with Pete Newell and Joe Felter as well as the Hacking for Diplomacy course with Jeremy Weinstein at Stanford. In 2022, Steve Weinstein created Hacking for Oceans, Climate and Hacking for Impact. This fall Jennifer Carolan will launch Hacking for Education at Stanford.

Team TeachAssist – Automating Student Assessments for Special Education Teachers

Click here to see the TeachAssist Presentation.

Design of This Class

While the Lean LaunchPad students are experiencing what appears to them to be a fully hands-on, experiential class, it’s a carefully designed illusion. In fact, it’s highly structured. The syllabus has been designed so that we are offering continual implicit guidance, structure, and repetition. This is a critical distinction between our class and an open-ended experiential class.

For example, students start the class with their own initial guidance – they believe they have an idea for a product or service (Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps) or have been given a clear real-world problem (Hacking for Defense). Coming into the class, students believe their goal is to validate their commercialization or deployment hypotheses. (The teaching team knows that over the course of the class, students will discover that most of their initial hypotheses are incorrect.)

Team Maurice.ai – A Home Robot for the GPT Era

Click here to see the Maurice.ai Presentation.

The Business Model Canvas

The business/mission model canvas offers students guidance, explicit direction, and structure. First, the canvas offers a complete, visual roadmap of all the hypotheses they will need to test over the entire class. Second, the canvas helps the students goal-seek by visualizing what an optimal endpoint would look like – finding product/market fit. Finally, the canvas provides students with a map of what they learn week-to-week through their customer discovery work.

I can’t overemphasize the important role of the canvas. Unlike an incubator or accelerator with no frame, the canvas acts as the connective tissue – the frame – that students can fall back on if they get lost or confused. It allows us to teach the theory of how to turn an idea, need, or problem into commercial practice, week by week a piece at a time.

Team Waifinder – Personalized Guidance For High School Students to Effectively Apply to College

Click here to see the Waifinder Presentation.

Lean LaunchPad Tools

The tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.) offer guidance and structure for students to work outside the classroom. The explicit goal of 10-15 customer interviews a week along with the requirement for building a continual series of minimal viable products provides metrics that track the team’s progress. The mandatory office hours with the instructors and support from mentors provide additional guidance and structure.

Team PocketDot – Gamified Braille Self-Learning Solution for Braille Learners

Click here to see the PocketDot Presentation.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

While I authored this blog post, this class is a team project. The secret sauce of the success of the Lean LaunchPad at Stanford is the extraordinary group of dedicated volunteers supporting our students in so many critical ways.

The teaching team consisted of myself and:

• Steve Weinstein, partner at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley technology companies and Hollywood media companies. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of all the major motion picture studios. He
• Lee Redden – CTO and co-founder of Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere) who was a student in the first Lean LaunchPad class 14 years ago!
• Jennifer Carolan, Co-Founder, Partner at Reach Capital the leading education VC
• Shawn Carolan Partner at Menlo Ventures.

Our teaching assistants this year were Chapman Ellsworth, Francesca Bottazzini and Ehsan Ghasemi.

Mentors helped the teams understand if their solutions could be a commercially successful business. Thanks to Lofton Holder, Bobby Mukherjee, Steve Cousins, David Epstein, Kevin Ray, Rekha Pai, Rafi Holtzman and Kira Makagon. They were led by Todd Basche.

Summary

While the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps curriculum was a revolutionary break with the past, it’s not the end. In the last decade enumerable variants have emerged. The class we teach at Stanford has continued to evolve. Better versions from others will appear. AI is already having a major impact on customer discovery and validation. And one day another revolutionary break will take us to the next level.

But today, we get to celebrate: eight teams in, eight companies out.

---

Entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement and the curriculums for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and Hacking for Defense and Diplomacy, he’s changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate. Read his blog here.