In addition to recently starting two new customer development projects, I’ve also been busy prepping for my guest lecture in Steve Blank’s Customer Development course at Haas (UC Berkeley business school).  The lecture was Tuesday night.  One of my key objectives was to help the students understand that everything seems intuitive and easy in the classroom, but in the heat of execution you quickly get overwhelmed.  A single board member demanding quick growth can easily push you from a logical sequence of figuring things out to desperately throwing money at potential growth drivers.  Anyone who thinks it’s going to be easy is in for a big surprise. 

This blog shares the objective of grounding entrepreneurs is reality.  Most entrepreneurs (especially first timers) are unrealistically optimistic.  If they logically thought about the risks, they probably wouldn’t be starting a company in the first place.  The chances of failure far outweigh the chances of success.  But everyone thinks they are the exception to the rule – and some actually are…

I’m often disappointed that I don’t have more time to update this blog.  I guess if I did have a lot of time to update the blog, it would be full of impractical theory that isn’t grounded in reality.  Real entrepreneurs (not the armchair wannabe entrepreneurs) would quickly recognize it as an exercise in mental masturbation.  But I understand that the infrequency of my posts causes some readers to forget about it.   So rather than risk the impression that I’ve given up on the Blog, I’m going to try to start posting on a regular schedule – a new post every Monday. Fortunately the majority of my readers don’t have time to read several posts per week.  They are busy growing their own startups, etc.