SXSW 2013 Sampler

Foreword
When I fi rst started blogging in August
of 2008, I had no idea what to expect. Startup
blogging was hardly “cool” back then.
Plenty of venture capitalists advised me
against it.
My personal background was as an
engineer and my companies had been
web-based startups, so that is what I wrote
about. Struggling to explain the successes
and failures of those companies, I discussed
principles like continuous deployment, customer
development, and a hyper-accelerated
form of agile. When I delved into lean manufacturing,
I discovered the concepts and
terminology dovetailed. Th e result: a new
idea I called Th e Lean Startup.
I started with some basic theory: that a
startup is an institution designed to thrive
in the soil of extreme uncertainty; that
traditional management techniques rooted
in forecasting and planning would not work
well in the face of that uncertainty. Th erefore,
we needed a new management toolkit
designed explicitly for iteration, scientifi c
learning, and rapid experimentation.
At the time, I viewed it as incidental that
the theory might be tied to a particular
industry, such as high-tech startups or
web-based environments. Lean, after all,
emerged from Toyota, a huge automobile
manufacturing company. I simply stated my
belief that Lean Startup principles would
work in other types of startups and in
other areas of business where uncertainty
reigned.
Boy, was I unprepared for what happened
next. I was hopeful that we would change
the way startups are built—but I didn’t know.
Fast-forward more than four years and
I’m astounded by what has emerged.
A nascent community has blossomed into
a full-fl edged movement. Entrepreneurs,
both new and experienced, proudly share
their Lean Startup learning in case studies,
conferences, and many, many blogs. Books,
workshops, and courses authored by passionate
practitioners relate experience, share
insight, and create tools to teach students
ways to make Lean Startup principles their
own. Many investors, advisors, mentors, and
even celebrity entrepreneur icons speak the
Lean Startup language.
It’s a big tent. We stand on the shoulders
of giants: customer development, the theory
of disruptive innovation, the technology
life-cycle adoption theory, and agile development.
Complementary lines of thinking,
such as that of user experience professionals,
design thinking practitioners, and the functional
disciplines of sales, marketing, operations,
and even accounting, come together
to share practices that lift us all.
Lean Startup has gone mainstream.
I wish I could say that this was all part of
some master plan, that I knew all along
that companies of all sizes—even those far
outside the high-technology world—would
embrace Lean Startup. I wish I had foreseen
that within a year of publishing Th e Lean
Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use
Continuous Innovation to Achieve Radically
Successful Businesses, many large organizations,
including such monsters as the
United States Federal government (!) would
have recognized that to cope with today’s
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