New conference website, speakers, agenda

The Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23 is fast approaching. Earlybird Admission pricing ends in just two days. We have a brand new website up at http://sllconf.com. We've got a new scholarship program up and running. Most importantly, we've announced a big chunk of the agenda for the day (go take a look).

I want to say a few words about why I am so excited about this event. Traveling the past year, I have heard loud and clear that it's time for the Lean Startup movement to enter its next phase. We've gone from total obscurity to something people are beginning to misunderstand and even co-opt. People are starting to argue about who should get credit for coining the term. Congratulations. Being misunderstood is a big step up from being ignored. I believe it means we're achieving product/market fit for a set of ideas. And it's time to completely ignore the nonsense and start focusing on: how do we take this movement to the next level?

Here's what you had to say about it. Almost a thousand of your weighed in on the last Lessons Learned reader survey (thank you!). When asked, you were pretty clear in your answers. Here's a tiny sample:

"Case studies, case studies, case studies presented by real people. Lot's of opportunity for personal interaction with people that have or are adopting the methodology."

"Detailed case studies of how it was done. Practical advice on how to do it in companies at all stages."

"Case studies
Serious entrepreneurs not wannabes
actual nuts and bolts, I'm sold ont he phiilosophy
debates of contentious issues - not just yes men"

"Some of the core personalities of the group, a number of startups (who have already achieved fit etc and have success) who can talk from experience."

I know one thing for sure: I don't have all the answers. The way forward requires getting everyone together in a room, and having a conversation about where we're headed. That's what this conference is for. The focus is on case studies and real entrepreneurs. Our goal is to create the most coherent startup conference ever. When I was a practicing entrepreneur, startup events usually made me crazy. You had a lot of conflicting advice and success theater. Tactics were discussed out of context, and there wasn't an overarching framework for figuring out what works for what kinds of companies, industries, and stages of growth. My aspiration with the Lean Startup methodology has always been to provide such a framework, so that we have more intelligent conversations about what works and what doesn't for startups. This event will be a chance to put that idea to the test.

Each part of the program is organized around one phase of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and begins with a keynote address from a heavy hitter: Steve Blank on Customer Development, Randy Komisar on "Getting to Plan B" and - a third person, not-yet-announced-but-extremely-cool-trust-me. Then, we'll talk case studies in each area, presented by practicing entrepreneurs who have actually grappled with the topic at hand. I've asked each presenter not to pull any punches and to, whenever possible, share real data: what worked, what didn't. We're in pursuit of the truth, not orthodoxy. These case studies range in size and scope: from pre-product/market fit to already exited, bootstrapped to venture-backed, solo practitioner to large organization.

Each part of the agenda also features a difficult question. These are the big questions I've heard over and over again as I've traveled presenting the lean startup methodology:

• "Sure, sounds great for a five-person team, but how can such a fast-paced development process scale? Doesn't the communication overhead of a large team lead to chaos of overlapping experiments and continuously-deployed bugs?"
  
  
• "If you just throw a minimum viable product out the door to see what sticks, won't that necessarily be ugly and badly designed? Is design important to lean startups? What does viable mean, anyway?"
  
  
• "Sure, everyone knows that getting customer feedback is important. But can't I outsource that to a market researcher? And do I still need to get out of the building if I've got great metrics and surveys?"

We'll tackle these questions head-on with a combination of practitioners and theorists. At the end of the day, you'll have the data and have heard the theories - it'll be up to you to make your own decisions and test them out for yourself.

Well, not entirely by yourself, actually. I've mentioned before that this event is designed to be best-experienced by teams, not just individuals. So we've made a limited number of team tickets available, which give teams of up to four people the opportunity to experience the day together. We'll have special seating for teams combined with exclusive access to a set of mentors who have agreed to be part of the conference as well. Mentors will sit with the teams throughout the day, and be available to answer questions and help put what you're hearing in context. Most important, they can help you make a plan for how to translate the insights from the stage into action back at the office. Like the speakers, mentors are a mix of theorists and practitioners. We've just started to list the mentors on our new website, and will add more as we get closer to the event itself.

This conference has been one of the most stressful things I've ever done. It feels surprisingly personal and surprisingly vulnerable. As an entrepreneur, I am used to having people attack my product or complain about my decisions (you can see the evidence here). But, in the past, being in a company gave me something to hide behind. Not anymore. For the conference, the most common criticism has been that it is too expensive, and therefore "not very lean." Here's an example from a recent Hacker News discussion:

"how can you be a lean startup if you have to pay $699 to know how to be lean? $699 buys you months of server infrastructure."

I think this is a fair question. Of course, readers of this blog know that the lean in "lean startup" doesn't refer to cost, but - rather - to Lean Thinking. Or, as Steve Blank put it, Lean Startups Aren't Cheap Startups. My fundamental belief is that by changing the way that we approach building startups, we can dramatically change our odds of success - and the magnitude of that eventual success as well. I think that's worth the price of admission and a better investment than marginally more infrastructure. Am I right? The verdict is in your hands. Maybe we won't get a huge crowd. If a relatively small number of highly-motivated entrepreneurs attend, then we'll have an intense and intimate conversation. Either way, I'm going to be satisfied.

For those who cannot afford the ticket price, who don't think it's worth the price, or who cannot travel to San Francisco, there are other ways to participate. We have scholarship programs available to help with ticket prices. We're offering a live stream to event organizers around the world. Meetup groups, universities, incubators, and anyone else who wants to get together to watch is welcome to do so. We'll be listing these viewing parties on our website as we confirm them. If you'd like to host an event, please let us know using this form. If you have questions, please contact our simulcast organizer, Erin Turner. 

The Lean Startup movement is already global (see the map). That's as it should be, as the new era of entrepreneurship that is now dawning is intrinsically global. Ideas, products, and capital flow easily across borders. People, not as much. Startups may be intellectually global but they are physically local, which explains the increasing importance of startup hubs around the world. My hope for this conference is that it will benefit the global community of entrepreneurs. For those who can travel to be part of the conversation in San Francisco, I thank you. I hope you'll take back what you've learned and share it in your own cities. For those who can host a local simulcast, I thank you. By creating a space for your startup community to congregate and share new ideas, you're enabling a new kind of economic growth. And most importantly, to everyone who contributes to this movement - by writing, asking hard questions, joining meetups and mailing lists, and above all creating companies - I thank you. See you in April.

Two new scholarship programs for lean startups

Thanks to the generosity of sponsors, I'm pleased to be able to announce two scholarship programs for upcoming lean startup events.

The first, sponsored by IMVU, will provide free tickets to deserving companies who want to attend the  Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. I'm especially grateful to IMVU which is, after all, where I first experimented with many lean startup practices. Now the company is growing, profitable, and proving that lean startups can scale. Oh, and did I mention that they're hiring? It's an exciting time to join, as IMVU is poised for a year of explosive growth. What better way to learn how to build a lean startup than to see one up close and personal? Right. Scholarship: you can apply here until April 12.

I'm hopeful that other companies will step up and become scholarship sponsors, too. This conference will be the first of its kind: an opportunity to have a conversation about the future of the lean startup movement. We want everyone who can contribute to that conversation to be there, regardless of their ability to pay. To ensure that those who are regular contributors to the movement to be able to attend as well, I've given each Lean Startup Meetup leader a set of discount codes and a few half-price tickets to distribute to their members. Please get in touch with your local meetup if you'd like to learn more.

The second scholarship, sponsored by TechWeb, will provide free passes to the entire Web 2.0 Expo, including the Lean Startup Intensive on May 3. When I agreed to setup the Lean Startup Intensive this year, I required that it include a scholarship program for deserving startups who couldn't otherwise afford the price of admission. TechWeb has decided to expand this program to provide scholarships for the whole Web 2.0 Expo. You can apply here until April 15 or until they receive 100 submissions--whichever comes first.
 
I look forward to seeing many of you at these events. If you have any questions or are interested in becoming a sponsor, please get in touch.

Speed up or slow down? (for Harvard Business Review)

Over at Harvard Business Review, I've been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Here's an excerpt:

The Startup's Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Every startup that achieves success eventually faces a critical moment — whether to speed up or slow down. It usually looks like this: the can-do attitude and high-bandwidth communication that characterized the first few iterations have produced magic. Everyone was in the flow; the team was hyper-productive. In many cases, they did the impossible, building a new product faster, cheaper, and better than anyone could have predicted. In the early days, chaos stayed under control. Duplicating efforts and stepping on toes was quickly resolved by short all-hands meetings. Firefighting was part of the fun of living on the edge. Defective prototype code was as often thrown out (because customers didn't want it) as it was fixed (when customers did). Hence, cutting corners often paid huge dividends. And with success came growth: in resources, staff and attention. And a certain amount of chaos reigned too.

But as the team gets bigger, early mistakes become more costly. Pretty soon, a soul-searching meeting ensues. 'Are we going too fast?' 'Will the addition of process kill our innovative culture?' 'Well-functioning teams just don't make these kinds of mistakes, right?'

This is the speed-up-or-slow-down moment.

Read the rest of The Startup's Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review ...

You can view previous essays in this series here:

• Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?
• Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable
• Beware of Vanity Metrics 
• For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?

The new startup arms race (for Huffington Post)

The Huffington Post published an op-ed on the Startup Visa movement that I've been working on for some time. I've quoted from the article extensively below, but I hope you'll take a moment and read the whole thing. I believe we have a unique opportunity to pass the Startup Visa Act this year - if we continue to stay focused on delivering the message to lawmakers that this is something their constituents want. So, as a reminder, if this is something you support, please get involved. You can literally make a difference with as little as a tweet, by using 2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org/. Once you've done that, let us know if you want to do more. You can find a list of ways to get involved at StartupVisa.com. Thanks!

The New Startup Arms Race

America's future prosperity depends on our ability to maintain this lead. But today, it is getting harder and harder to maintain. A quick glance is the rear-view mirror reveals that other countries are catching up and at an alarming rate. Part of this is due to their determination to overtake us, but part is due to structural changes in the nature of entrepreneurship.

Startups are the lifeblood of our economy. In the past two decades, they have accounted for nearly all the net job growth in our country. Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. But many more are true American success stories, out of the limelight, quietly creating jobs and securing our future.

Take the example of Indiana's Passageways. Paroon Chadha came to the US for his graduate education, and was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug immediately after school. He started Passageways Inc. immediately upon graduating, and has spent the last 8 years struggling to work around visa restrictions. Luckily for the rest of us, he was able to find his path to a green card, and now employs 24 Americans in West Lafayette, Indiana. For every success story like Paroon's, there are dozens -- hundreds -- of similar cases that end in failure.

Like other industries -- from publishing to automobiles -- entrepreneurship is in the process of being disrupted by globalization. The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an Internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production.

[...]

If the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon begins in another country, the economic growth that it sparks will benefit us, too. But the jobs will be created over there.

The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource -- the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.

If we allow other countries to welcome these immigrants, support them and nurture them, we will lose out in this race. We will not lose on their products -- after all, most of them are global. We will not necessarily harm investors, either: as capital is increasingly global, they will be able to invest wherever good ideas are born. The cost will be felt in jobs -- thousands of new jobs that could have been created here, but weren't.

Read the rest of The New Startup Arms Race at Huffington Post. Special thanks to everyone who's helped advance this movement, especially Brad Feld, Shervin Pishevar, Dave McClure, Dave Binetti and Abheek Anand. And an extra special thanks to the volunteer copyeditors who reached out via twitter to help improve this piece.

For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? (for Harvard Business Review)

In the latest article for my series in HBR, I discuss the problem of how to figure out how much process startups should have. I often hear that what makes startups effective is their complete lack of process, but I don't think this is correct. Process is not the same as bureaucracy. In fact, I believe process is a form of discipline. When done right, it can help startups accelerate even as they scale.

You can view previous entries:

• Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?
• Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable
• Beware of Vanity Metrics

I'm a little late on the cross-post, but hope you'll enjoy it nonetheless.

For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review:

Still, startups develop some kind of process — whether it's disciplined, haphazard, bureaucratic or empowering — because building a great product depends on it.

They just need to balance process with innovation. Companies that insist on building a world-class infrastructure before shipping a product are doomed to 'achieve failure,' because they're starved of feedback for too long. I learned this lesson first hand in a previous company (read the sad story here). On the other hand, companies that take a 'just do it' attitude without any process at all are also taking a major gamble. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

Finding the right balance requires an understanding of the fundamental feedback loop that powers all startups.

Read the rest: For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23, 2010 in SF)

Today we are opening up registration for the first ever Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. I'm incredibly excited. The event is being produced in partnership with Charles Hudson, who puts on many of Silicon Valley's top events, including the forthcoming Freemium Summit.

The Startup Lessons Learned Conference is by-and-for entrepreneurs, and only entrepreneurs. We have a lineup of speakers who are primarily active practitioners of the lean startup methodology. They'll be speaking about their real-life experiences trying to put these ideas into practice. You'll also have a chance to hear from the leading lights of the lean startup movement, including Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, and many more.

I have spent a lot of time over the past few years experimenting with what helps startup teams adopt new practices. One pattern has been overwhelmingly clear: it works best when a cross-functional team hears about new ideas all at the same time. As a result, we've built this event to be best experienced by teams, not just individuals. We have special team tickets; these teams will have special seating at the event and special access to mentors, who can answer questions and suggest ways to incorporate ideas from the speakers into each team's company.

This event is for present and future entrepreneurs only - not service vendors or investors. If you are working on new product development in any sized company, you are welcome to attend. Remember, a startup is "a human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty." If that describes your job, you're welcome to attend. (We will reserve a limited number of spots for sponsors to attend; if you'd like to become a sponsor, please get in touch.)

For those that are able to make the trip to San Francisco, I hope you'll make the effort. I think this is going to be a one of a kind event, and you'll be glad you came. That said, for those who cannot make the trip, we're working to provide simulcast venues in cities around the world. We'll have more details shortly. In the meantime, if you'd like to attend remotely, or volunteer to host a viewing, please sign up as part of this survey. And for those of you who have already volunteered, please stay tuned for details.

A partial list of speakers and mentors is posted on the registration page. More will be posted as we're able to confirm them. If you'd like to nominate someone to be a speaker or mentor, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. We'll consider all nominees; when possible, please include a link to a video of them speaking or to a relevant blog post.

Last, I always try to have a scholarship program for paid events, and this one is no exception. If you'd like to sponsor a scholarship for a deserving startup that can't afford to make the trip, please let me know. At past events, the generosity of these scholarships has been amazing, and has meant a whole host of interesting people were able to benefit who would not have been able to otherwise. To those who can make a donation, you have my thanks. We'll post details of how to apply for scholarships after we get a sense for how many we will be able to award.

Startup Visa update

As I write this, I am traveling at 30,000 feet on Virgin America's excellent IAD->SFO nonstop, following an intense few days of conversations in Washington, DC about the Startup Visa. This trip was designed to build momentum following last week's announcement that Senators Kerry and Lugar have introduced a Senate bill to make the Startup Visa a reality: the Startup Visa Act of 2010. This follows Congressman Jared Polis, who has introduced a similar bill as part of comprehensive immigration reform in the House.

Our trip was bipartisan, bicameral, and bi-branches-of-government. Everywhere we went, the Startup Visa received a fair hearing, despite the fact that we have no lobbyists, no PAC, and no organized presence in Washington. On the flight to DC, we had over 5000 registered voters join our "tweet hall" and generate a huge stack of paper which we delivered to members of Congress, courtesy of 2gov.








Your support has been critical to everything that's happened with Startup Visa. After so many of you stepped forward to show your support in last year's 2gov campaign, I got a call out of the blue from a member of Senator Lugar's staff. He gave me the opportunity to answer questions about our proposal, and share the stories of immigrant entrepreneurs who are creating job all over America, including the Senator's home state of Indiana. I firmly believe that without your grassroots organizing, this meeting would never have taken place, and who knows if, months later, the Startup Visa Act would have been introduced?
 
Having bills introduced in both chambers of Congress is a huge accomplishment. But it's still just the very beginning of the marathon required to get a bill to become law. For those who want to continue to press the case for the Startup Visa, here are five ways you can help today:

1. Go to our campaign page and voice your support
2. Write to your local newspapers, and let them know that you support the Startup Visa Bill
3. Call your senators, and let them know about why you support the Startup Visa legislation
4. Add the Startup Visa Widget to your blog or website
5. Contribute to Startup Visa so that we can continue to spread the word!

And, on an unrelated note, we also had an entertaining night at the DC Lean Startup Meetup featuring me and Dave McClure, in what was billed as a "Lean Geek SMACKdown." You can judge for yourself if we lived up to that promise:


Lean Startup SmackDown from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

Kiwi lean startup + Australia next

Wrapping up a fabulous few weeks in New Zealand, where I had the privilege of attending some great events, like Kiwi Foo and Webstock; met some amazing entrepreneurs and inventors (yes, including a jet pack); and generally enjoyed a supportive and enthusiastic reception. I want to especially thank the dozens of Kiwis who acted as my guardians and escorts from place to place, even driving me around on the wrong side of the road

Every tourist will tell you that New Zealand is a beautiful country, and they are not kidding.
 


I would add that the people I met were extraordinarily welcoming, friendly, and humble. In fact, you have to learn to adjust to the humility. Quite a few Kiwis told me that they "didn't count" as entrepreneurs, even though they own their own business. Their supposed lack of ambition was belied by the many cool demos and startups I got to meet. If you're in Europe, for example, keep an eye out for the innovative YikeBike, a new kind of personal transport device. It was described to me as "what the Segway should have been." Overall, I came away from the experience optimistic about the potential of New Zealand to cultivate a significant startup hub. I look forward to seeing it happen. If anyone is interested, the Wellington Lean Startup Meetup is a good place to start.

Up next is an extremely brief stop in Australia. I'm particularly looking forward to inaugurating the Sydney Lean Startup meetup. We'll be kicking it off with an event featuring yours truly Monday March 1 at 6pm. If you're a Sydney entrepreneur, I hope you'll stop by. Last time I checked, there were still a few half-price tickets left. You can register here.

Most of the events I did here were private, so there aren't as many videos and slides available. For now, you'll have to make do with the slides from my keynote at Webstock:

2010 02 19 the lean startup - webstock 2010

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

Hopefully, video of that talk will be available soon. For a preview, you can check out this "backstage pass" interview, which was recorded at Kiwi Foo a few days before.

I also did a radio interview on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon program. You can hear me attempt to explain the ideas behind the lean startup to the general public in MP3 or Ogg.

Webstock generated a lot of follow-on commentary, including a number of reviews. For a good synopsis of my talk (and the other keynotes), check out Idealog's blog. I also recorded an interview with them, which should be in the next issue of their extremely cool-looking print magazine. Other write-ups: NZ Herald, gianouts, Te Ara, Public Address, Bibliophile, BIB. Also, if you're an event organizer, check out some of the innovative ways the Webstock team encouraged attendees to interact with each other and with the speakers. Highlights for me were the Webstock Game and Webstock Bingo.

Last, if you didn't get a chance to see it, be sure to check out this video of the closing performance for Webstock (which was also an award show called the ONYAs). It was mind-expanding:

Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)

Diversity is the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. As entrepreneurs, more than any other industry, we’re in the meritocracy business. The companies that make decisions based on merit, rather than title, politics, or hierarchy execute faster and learn faster than their competitors. For startups (and other innovators), that’s a decisive advantage.

So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign. What are the odds that the decisions that were made to create that team were really meritocratic? That’s why I care a lot about diversity: not for its own sake, but because it is a source of strength for teams that have it, and a symptom of dysfunction for those that don’t.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about gender equity in the high-tech and entrepreneurship worlds lately. This is a good thing. (I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) We have a lot of introspection to do. By any objective standard, we ought to be diverse. Our industries are young, so there hasn’t been time yet to become encrusted with too many traditions that exclude outsiders. The work itself, especially in startups, depends primarily on intelligence, communication, creativity and empathy. Even the most radical Bell Curve-style thinkers have to concede that even if there are differences between men and women in the distribution of these traits on average, these curve have substantial overlap, and there should still be a lot more of them represented in high-tech startups.

For the record, I don’t think such biological differences are one-sided in favor of men. In fact, recent research suggests just the opposite. Vivek Wadhwa and his team continue their excellent work investigating the true nature of entrepreneurship. Their recent article suggests that startups led by women are actually more successful, on average, than those led by men. This doesn’t surprise me at all, and you don’t have to support a biological determinism theory to see why. If women face structural barriers to becoming entrepreneurs, then those few who are able to overcome those barriers are probably exceptional to begin with. Or, maybe it is true that women make better entrepreneurs than men. Either way, we’ll benefit if more women are welcomed into startups and other high-tech companies.

Diverse teams make better decisions than homogenous ones. I won’t recap the academic research that underlies this assertion; for that, you should read James Surowecki’s excellent Wisdom of Crowds. The most counter-intuitive part of this phenomenon, though, is that this diversity still improves outcomes even when the added opinions are less accurate than the previous consensus. The hypothesis, which makes sense to me based on the teams I’ve worked with, is that having someone with a wacky outlier-type experience causes everyone else to reexamine their own assumptions and find flaws in their own argument. So, even if you already know best, you’ll still benefit from having others on your team to challenge you.

Diversity benefits men, too. One of the most pernicious effects of groupthink is the sense of entitlement it breeds. Teams that are complacent are less likely to challenge their own assumptions, less likely to listen to feedback and, therefore, less likely to learn. This is especially important across functional lines. I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “operations cave.” Outsiders are afraid to enter, let alone make a suggestion. The safety of the group becomes an impediment to dealing with reality. Problems are easily dismissed as PEBKAC ("Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair") rather than as opportunities for root cause analysis. Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team.

Diversity is not the only requirement for making good group decisions. Two others – that each team member give their input independently and that the results be objectively aggregated – are also key parts of building a meritocracy. To be clear, though, this diversity refers only to diversity of opinion, not necessarily to demographic diversity. So why is demographic diversity important?

Demographic diversity is an indicator. It’s a reasonable inference that a group that is homogeneous in appearance was probably chosen by a biased selector. Even if men have an innate advantage at software development, the gap would have to be massive in order to explain why startup after startup has an all-male team.

Another explanation is that of compounding effects throughout the “pipeline” of candidates. In school, women are discouraged from pursuing math and science. Smart women are often stigmatized. Teachers aren’t encouraging. Women are paid less than men. And sexism is surely implicated in many career decisions. These effects compound, becoming larger over time. But this can’t possibly be the whole story. If it were, entrepreneurship would have a much larger proportion of women at every level compare to other industries – because tech entrepreneurs are younger than successful people in most other fields. There’s much less of a career ladder to climb, and therefore less time for these compounding effects to add up.

Plus, technical skills are easily learned – in my experience – by anyone with sufficient IQ and determination. I have personally taught many “non-technical” people to program – graphic designers, QA folks, even artists and animators. When those people have the chance to contribute in a meritocratic environment, they have many opportunities to learn and grow. So why aren’t more women finding themselves in the position to get started on their 10,000 hours?

With identity issues, there is no dichotomy between symbolic action and substantive action, thanks to a human tendency known as priming. In psychology research, when subjects are simply reminded of some aspect of their identity, and then measured performing a task, the pre-task activity “primes” their brain in ways that affects their performance. If the priming involves a negative stereotype, it has negative effects. So, for example, asking men and women about their gender before giving them a math test produces a significantly different result than asking other innocuous questions. (See this study among many others: http://www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/article/430)

Even the fact that a startup is all-male can make it less likely that a women would want to join. Even worse, it might even affect her performance in an interview. And just solving the gender imbalance might not be helpful, if the solution involves yet more negative stereotypes. Which is why affirmative action doesn’t help. A company with an all-female support staff sends, in some ways, an even worse signal.

Understanding these problems can make the solutions seem intractable. After all, if you already have an all-male startup, you’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring the very women that could fix that imbalance. But priming cuts both ways: when we go out of our way to affirm meritocracy, it actually improves everyone’s performance. In fact, explicitly making meritocracy a value is actually better than rejecting stereotypes – by calling attention to the stereotype, you’re still engaging in priming.

Instead of focusing on programs designed to specifically benefit any one group, I think our focus should be on making our companies as meritocratic as possible. I want to start with the easiest suggestion I can think of, one that I’ve personally used with great success. I first tried it as an experiment after reading in Blink that after symphony orchestras instituted blind auditions (where conductors can’t see who is actually playing), gender equality soon followed. In the US, women’s participation went from about 5% to 50% over the course of two decades. What’s notable about this change is that it has nothing to do with gender per se, and probably also eliminated many other forms of unconscious bias.

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. “Who is this guy?” I had a hard time forming a visual image, which made it harder to try and compare each candidate to the successful people I’d worked with in the past. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which instantly revealed just how much I’d been relying on surface qualities when screening resumes before – even when I thought I was being 100% meritocratic. And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

And yet, when I suggest this practice to hiring managers and recruiters alike, they rarely do it. Hiring managers say, “the recruiter would never go for it” while recruiters say, “the hiring manager won’t accept it.” What I think we’re really saying is: “I don’t want to know if I am biased.” That's understandable - it's embarrassing! Even if our biases are only implicit and not consciously held, the systems we build can still contain bias. When we change a hiring policy, especially if we do it in a visible way, we reap two benefits. We actually improve our hiring process and also signal our commitment to meritocracy.

Now, I don’t know how to conduct blind interviews for startup or high-tech jobs. If I did, I would try it in a heartbeat. But even after the initial resume screen, I think there are things we can do to ensure our decision process is merit-based. I’ve covered these in some detail in two previous posts: one on Assessing fit and one on conducting a technical interview. In short, it’s essential to keep the interview focused on the substance of the work the candidate will be asked to do, and not on gotcha or brain-teaser questions. Then, in the evaluation process, it’s essential that the discussion focus only on pertinent aspects of the candidate’s performance, again obeying the three rules of group decision-making: diversity, independence, and objective aggregation.

One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. When it’s possible, I always believe in giving a promising candidate who interviewed poorly a chance to demonstrate their skills with a real application exercise. At my last company, for programming jobs, we’d give some candidates a chance to prove themselves by writing a real working program in just a day or two (usually, to write a version of Tetris from scratch). We’d do the evaluations of that code blind – without the person in the room. In some cases, we’d dramatically revise an opinion formed during our live interview. The work product is a more realistic test, although it requires much more work on the part of the candidate.

Beyond hiring, our actual work process matters, too. I already advocate cross-functional teams as part of the lean startup methodology. Here I will only touch on one of their benefits, which is the opportunity for people to learn new skills. When teams are capacity constrained, their natural inclination is to let work pile up. This leads to a loss of quality and an increase in cycle time, both of which are negative. For more on this subject, take a look at The product manager's lament. Suffice to say that when teams are left on their own to innovate, they take on a “whatever it takes” attitude. This often leads to people discovering new skills they didn’t know they had.

By itself, that’s a pretty minor impact. But combined with a true merit-based decision making process, it becomes much bigger. If teams are rewarded for the results they achieve, and ideas can come from anywhere on the team, there’s a positive feedback loop available for people who are willing to learn: as they take on new skills, they become more successful at their job. Contrast that with a traditional siloed department. If you only get promoted for getting better at design, you’re unlikely to get positive reinforcement for picking up some programming skills (and vice-versa). And when people who started out as designers or marketers (or other supposedly "soft" disciplines) have the opportunity to learn programming, we effectively create new pathways to entrepreneurship that bypass the traditional pipeline problems. And, like everything else I've discussed, this also cuts both ways: programmers who learn design skills are much more likely to become successful entrepreneurs, too. I'll let Dave McClure explain why, if you'd like the detailed argument.

There’s a lot more we can do than just these ideas. All the usual ideas are good ones: I support inviting more women to speak at conferences, the creation of women-centric networking events like Women 2.0 and Girls in Tech, reforming the way we teach math and science in public schools, adopting more family-friendly public policy, the creation of TiE-like organizations. And, of course, the Startup Visa will be a tremendous help as well. None of these are impossible. Last year, I traveled to dozens of cities talking about lean startups and meeting people interested in entrepreneurship. Almost everywhere, I spoke to rooms full of (mostly) men. There was one notable exception: Sweden. It’s not a coincidence; rather, it’s the result of proactive public policy. (And, before we get to that old tired argument: no, I do not believe you need to become a socialist country in order to achieve those results. I haven’t seen any evidence to support that assertion, although I hear it all the time.)

I think we could all do some serious thinking about how we can be part of the solution in our own lives. I’ve been in many rooms – and at countless events – with entrepreneurs and VC’s that I think would make women uncomfortable. The sexual jokes, the crude comments, even just the usual "success theater" chest thumping – all that macho BS. Personally, I have a moral objection to that behavior. But I recognize that there are plenty of people who disagree (and I’d welcome a chance to hear why they think it’s OK; I honestly don’t get it). We still shouldn’t tolerate it. We laugh at people who think software patents are awesome, or want to give the RIAA more power, or think big companies should have a veto power over new technologies that are “too disruptive.” Those are all positions that are coherent, understandable, and anti-meritocratic. We need to recognize that supporting a homogeneous status quo is just as dumb, and just as bad for our industry.


After all, we're in the meritocracy business.


Update: Some of the commenters both here and over at Hacker News seem to be struggling with the math part of the argument, which is that even if there are biological differences in ability, they are not large enough to explain the observed outcome. I'm not much of a statistician, so I am indebted to @hypatiadotca who shared this excellent and brief presentation by Terri Oda. It is so much better than my own attempts to argue the point that I am including it here. Enjoy:

How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science?  Hint: it doesn't.

Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review)

The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Any entrepreneur with a decent reality distortion field can find metrics that make it look like they're being successful. This "success theater" is occasionally useful for PR or getting through a tough board meeting. But it's lethal when we start to run the company using vanity metrics as a guide. But how do we know which metrics to look at? How do we know how much energy to invest in analytics vs. doing real work? And how do we get the whole team to take action that benefits real people when all they're looking at is abstract numbers on a screen? Remember "metrics are people, too." For more, read on...

Entrepreneurs: Beware of Vanity Metrics - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review:

The idea is simple. Establish baseline metrics by building the minimum viable product — the minimum required to measure the response of early adopters. Then, in each development cycle, use the insights gained by studying customers to make improvements. This is the source of validated learning — proof that the customer insights translate into tangible metrics improvements.

But this leaves a very difficult problem still to be solved: How do we know that these changes are what actually effect change in the metrics that we're observing?

This is the curse of vanity metrics, numbers which look good on paper but aren't action oriented: website hits, message volume, or 'billions and billions served.' They look great in a press release, but what do they accomplish?

Consider a scenario where a team makes a product change, and the very next month page views go up. As humans, we're hard-wired to infer causality from correlation: when the numbers go up, we tend to take credit. But when the numbers go down, we tend to blame someone or something else. Worse yet, different team members tend to attribute positive changes to whatever project they were working on at the time (but not negative changes, of course). As a result, different parts of the team are constantly "learning" in their own private reality. When those teams face difficult choices, it's incredibly hard for them to come together and make an informed, fact-based decision.

To avoid falling into this trap, I recommend you follow the three A's of metrics. All metrics should be actionable, accessible, and auditable...

Read the rest of Entrepreneurs: Beware of Vanity Metrics at The Conversation on Harvard Business Review. Don't forget to leave a comment.

Tell your Startup Visa story

I've been promising big Startup Visa-related news on Twitter for a few weeks. There is news, it's very exciting, and I still can't share it. Soon, I promise. But in order for this idea to progress into legislation,  we need your help. Whether you're a US citizen or an immigrant, entrepreneur or investor, founder or employee, there's something you can do. This is especially true if you live outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. There are four ways to get involved below. Even if none apply to you, see if you know someone who could help. Thanks!

1. If you are an immigrant founder who has helped build a company that has created jobs in the US, we need you to tell your story. If we receive your story by February 27th, it will become part of our Geeks on a Plane DC delegation (including me) talking to lawmakers. We've created a place where you can tell your Startup Visa story anonymously if you'd like. Or, if you'd prefer to do it by video, you can upload to YouTube - just use the "startup visa" tag.
   
   
2. If you're a startup investor, and you support the goals of the Startup Visa proposal, we'd like you lend your name to our efforts. You can read about the latest iteration of the proposal at StartupVisa.com. If you're willing to publicly sign on to a letter of support, please get in touch. If you'd be willing to talk to the press about your support, please leave a comment here as well.
   
   
3. If you are a US citizen that is employed at a company with at least one immigrant founder, we'd love to hear your stories, too. Part of our belief in advancing this legislation is that more startup founders means more jobs and economic growth for everyone. The fact of Americans standing up for our values - of openness, meritocracy, and entrepreneurship - is especially powerful.
   
   
4. If you're registered to vote in the United States, and you'd like your elected representatives to know that you support the Startup Visa, you can register your support in just two minutes at http://2gov.org/visa. Although signing up is about as much work as a tweet, the impact is much larger. 2gov does the work to produce hard-copy reports of constituent sentiment and delivers them to the appropriate officials. So by signing up, you're sending a message directly to the decision-makers who depend on your votes for their jobs.

I hope you'll choose one of the steps above to help out. If you have other ideas, please feel free to leave them in a comment.

I know that sometimes campaigns like this can seem overwhelming. But your support has already had tremendous impact. The good news I hope we'll get to announce in a few days is the direct result of the twitter campaign you helped launch last year. At some point, I hope I'll be able to tell you more. For now, take my word for it. You are making this happen. Thank you.

Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, and more

I've been trying hard to cut back on travel in 2010 so as to have more time for writing. I started to feel like my blog became too much of a travel diary last year - and I still have many videos and presentations from last fall that I haven't shared yet. If you'd like to see me speak this year, there are only a few opportunities scheduled.

Next week, I'll be in New Zealand for Webstock 2010. I'll be giving a day-long workshop as well as a keynote address.They've got a great programme; my workshop will be on Monday, February 15 and my keynote will be Friday, February 19. I'll also be stopping by Kiwi Foo. If you're at either event, please do come say hello.

In March, I'll be speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Since we'll have a game-oriented crowd, I'll be talking more about my "virtual worlds" background than I normally do. I often get asked how lean startup ideas can work for the video game industry - which is, of course, where I originally started working on them. The talk itself will be Tuesday, March 9 at 11:15am.

In April, stay tuned for word on the Startup Lessons Learned Conference, which will also be held in San Francisco. Rather than make a premature announcement, I'll invite you to take the survey and help us make the event better.

In May, I'll be giving a keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I'm especially excited about this, because last year's Expo was the very first time I'd given the lean startup presentation to a large audience. The enthusiastic reception that day was part of what gave me the confidence to leap into this job full-time. I'm quite grateful to everyone who attended, and to the organizers who made it possible.

This year, lean startups will be a big part of the Web 2.0 Expo. In addition to my keynote, Steve Blank will be speaking. There's also a one-day Lean Startup Intensive on the first day of the conference (May 3). This will be a kind of "lean startup all-stars" event featuring a number of speakers and panels. Watch this blog for details. You can register for the intensive here. Thanks to the support of TechWeb, we'll be organizing a scholarship program for this event (stay tuned). Last, there are five large-scale sponsorship spots open for the event. If you've ever wanted to be a sponsor of a big event like the Web 2.0 Expo, but don't want to have your logo lost in the sea of sponsors, perhaps this would be a good choice. To get more info about sponsorship, you can contact Susan Young.

And, if you can't make it to any events this year, you can still catch the video. For example, here's the video of my talk last month at Twiistup in Los Angeles (slides are posted here):

I try to post event-related updates to Twitter, but if you want to subscribe to my event-specific plans directly, I'm trying Plancast (a new startup founded by a friend). You can subscribe to my plans here. Last, for those who are following the Startup Visa movement, we're planning a trip to DC in early March. If you'd like to participate, you can subscribe for updates on our Plancast page.