I’ve been in London for the last month and have heard policymakers react to the wake up call Elon Musk just delivered.  The decision of the U.S. to shut off intelligence and throttle the military version of Starlink called Starshield to Ukraine may have been a blip in the news in the US, but it […]

Announcing a Lean Educators Conference. Teaching Lean in the Age of AI. November 18-19th at K&S Ranch, California. When AI hit our spring Lean Launchpad for Deep Tech class, our teaching team was unprepared for the impact it made on the class. What I didn’t realize was that other Lean educators (Hacking for Defense, NSF […]

This article previously appeared in Cipher Brief. The DoW urgently needs to organize its scattered subterranean warfare assets into a single unified organization. Ideally, a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager (DRPM) for Subterranean Warfare, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of War. (The Department already uses this model for unmanned systems, critical weapons and Golden Dome.) This […]

You’re reading a four-part series on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us Part 2: AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP Part 3: The World Outside the Classroom Changed, The Class Didn’t This post: Lean LaunchPad – The […]

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants This is the third of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us Part 2: AI Killed the MVP – Long Live the IUP Part 3: This Post Part 4: […]

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it. Part 1: The Year AI Came For Us Part 2: This Post Next Week Part 3: The World Outside the Classroom Changed, The Class Didn’t […]

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants. 15 years ago, my Lean LaunchPad class changed how entrepreneurship is taught. The class is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide and helped launch thousands of startups. But this past summer, I got thinking about whether AI killed our Lean LaunchPad class, and with it the […]

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups. The class had gotten so […]

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries. Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.  Some will […]

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than […]

This article previously appeared in The Cipher Brief. For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event –  the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. We braced for a one-time shock we […]

This article previously appeared in the Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era.  Teams showed […]

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that […]

Join us at The 7th Annual Red Queen Conference April 22 -23 – Silicon Valley How do Portfolio Acquisition Executives and COCOMs ensure they’re working on the right problem with the right priority before locking in a requirement? Discuss, share and prototype Innovation Targeting concepts with your peers.  Get hands-on with the companies and venture […]

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die. I just had coffee […]

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.)  […]

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply […]

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32 Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened.  And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives. This is one of those stories. […]

This article previously appeared in Defense Scoop The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.)  Deputy Secretary of War Steven Feinberg ran Cerebus Capital Secretary of the Army Daniel […]

TL;DR   DoW Directory revision 3 is Online here, Order a print copy here. In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the […]

Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS).  The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performance to delivering advanced weapons at speed. Taking decades to deliver weapons is no longer an option. The DoW has joined the 21st century and adopted […]

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders […]

The October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations.  If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.Those inside the DoW have little perspective of […]

Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What do they do? And more importantly, why should anyone (outside of universities) care? (Unfortunately, you won’t see answers to these questions in […]

Great founders shine in a crisis. Ordinary ones watch their companies burn down. I just had coffee with two co-founders of an e-bike company who were mentoring one of our student teams. In short order I realized they were great founders – creative, agile and still having fun building their company. Unlike other e-bike rental […]

Announcing the 2025 edition of the DoW PEO Directory. Online here. Think of this PEO Directory as a “Who buys in the government?” phone book. Finding a customer for your product in the Department of War is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? What is the right Go-To-Market Strategy? […]

How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or die. This post tells the story of what happened when 4,000 companies faced a disruptive technology and why only one survived. In the early 20th […]