The Lean Startup Newsletter - December 18, 2014

The Lean Startup Newsletter - December 18, 2014 by Eric Ries

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12/18/2014

We’ve begun to take a look at the feedback from attendees of the 2014 Lean Startup Conference, and we’re doing our best to avoid focusing on vanity metrics when we think about how to make next year’s conference even better. If you attended, we hope you’ll share your stories and experiences and, if you didn’t, we’ll have video up soon.

I wanted to share shmula.com founder Pete Abilla's review of the conference because of its focus on what the Lean Manufacturing and Lean Startup communities can learn from one another. “Understanding the heavy influence of Toyota in the practice and language of the Lean Startup will help Lean Startup practitioners become even more effective,” he concludes, before proposing some questions to consider in an effort to better understand customers and eliminate waste.

Here are some other articles that caught my attention this week:

"A fight for the future"

Laura Wiedman Powers, CEO of CODE2040, wrote a piece for USA Today about the work the nonprofit is doing to create pathways in the tech sector for Black and Latino/a college students. “Our work may not have the level of urgency around it of the work being done in Ferguson and other cities around the country, but diversifying Silicon Valley and the tech sector more broadly does have great importance, because it is all part of the same fight.”

“It's about about building that bridge…”

Oscar Raymundo at Inc. wrote about Ben Horowitz’s strategies for creating more diverse companies, which he discussed at the conference. (Ben also sits on the board of CODE2040.) "Different cultures have different cultural strengths," he said, "and if you don't know what they are then it's hard to get the most value of a diverse workforce."

“An Ode to the Lean Startup”

Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO of Hootsuite, wrote about his Lean Startup experience at The Wall Street Journal. “More than five years on, the tool we hacked together in our office is used by more than 10 million people and supported by a staff of 700. It has evolved continuously from its first iteration, which would be barely recognizable to many of today’s users. And that’s the way it should be.”

Silicon Valley and Route 128

Justin Fox interviewed AnnaLee Saxenian, the dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, about her classic book Regional Advantage, in which she investigated the triumph of Silicon Valley over its rival tech industry in Boston. “What I learned was that being able to innovate very quickly, being able to be first to market with new products, being able to adapt to crises and to change quickly was much more of an enduring advantage for the region,” said Saxenian.

Cheers,Eric

Eric Rieshttps://twitter.com/ericrieshttp://www.startuplessonslearned.com