The highlight (for me) of last year’s SXSW-interactive conference was the Lean Startup SXSW – a whole day of planned content, mainly in one room (in the AT&T executive center) focused on the idea of “the lean startup”.  Eric Ries and team did a phenomenal job bringing together a set of topics and speakers that you just normally wouldn’t get exposure to in a single day.

Leveraging the success of that forum, SXSW has created the Startup Village this year.  The 4th floor of the Hilton will be converted to startup mecca.  I thought the “Lean Startup SXSW” track might have gone away in favor of this modified (and bigger billing) approach.  Apparently not so.  Today SXSW.com announces that they’re bringing Lean Startup SXSW back – and some of the chief instigators are involved again – Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Steve Blank, 500 Startups, et al:

The Lean Startup SXSW will take place on Saturday, March 10th from 9:30am – 6:00pm at the Downtown Hilton (across from the Convention Center), and the most up-to-date agenda can be found here.

So, more central location, same Saturday location in the schedule (good call).  The agenda already has enough speakers identified for me to plan my Saturday schedule.

Once again, good evidence of how SXSW adapts and co-opts good ideas from the outside.  Congrats to the organizers, I’m looking forward to it.

In Brakoniecki’s post on Lean Start-ups and the idea of Entrepreneur, he delves into the apparent conflict between the Taylor “Great Man” theory, and the Lean Startup’s emphasis on leadership, and learning (all while in essence refuting the idea of the Great Man). I commented on his blog directly but thought I’d share my thoughts here as well:

The relationship between the Great Man theory and Entrepreneur is a bit of a quandary in the lean startup community.  On the one hand, many people in the startup business contend, paraphrased, that “entrepreneurs are born rather than made.”  But the lean startup seems to say that entrepreneurship can be taught, learned, rather than born inside you.

The “born with it” argument, to me, seems to be in alignment with the idea of building companies around Great Men (very Ayn Rand, in my humble opinion).  But that doesn’t make it correct.  In my experience, these things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’d put it this way.  For some people, being a good entrepreneur *appears* to be innate.  We don’t know the person well enough to know how this talent developed, and what their experiences were – they’re a black box. To us, as if by magic, they are really good at entrepreneurship (and leading).  For others, it is more obviously a learned, thoughtfully acquired skill.

But I would argue that for literally everyone – born with it or not – if you decide to begin the journey of entrepreneurship, you can improve your chances if you learn.  And learning what Lean Startup has to offer is clearly a benefit- even if you choose not to apply lean startup methods to your efforts, at least you’re making an informed decision.  If you do apply lean startup, then of course the goal is that you also learn about your potential market and customers faster as well.

One thing clear to me is that lean startup (any startup) still requires leadership.  It’s hard to imagine any other possibility.  Critical decisions, pivots, and hires have to be made.  I just don’t see how you do that without good leadership.

And of course the other wrinkle is that not all leadership looks the same.  Contrast Tony Hsieh‘s style with Steve Jobs for example…

Really interesting progress on the state of the art for startup process.  It recently got some coverage at Austin Startup, with a great infographic included. But it has previously been discussed on Steve Blank’s blog.

The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading.  Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic.  It is included at the bottom of this post as well.  Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project.  I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses.  And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)

Startup Genome Report 01

Great read from the founders of Yipit, on the long hard road to become and overnight success:

So, it’s now February of 2010, over two and half years since we started, and we have yet another idea: build an aggregator for the early but quickly growing daily deal industry. The idea was sound, timely and right up our alley since we had been doing local deal aggregation for the last 9 months.

And, in just three days, everything changed.

We launched the new idea in a three-day scramble, got some initial press, users loved it, and four months later raised $1 million from amazing investors. A year after that, we’ve raised $6 million, made real revenue, attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and recruited amazing people to join our team (we’re hiring! join us!). And, best of all, we’re just getting started.

I really liked the raw honesty of this post.  I just quoted the happy part – 2.5 years in.  But there’s also this part:

“So, what do you do?”

Ugh. I hated that question.

The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.

Anyone with a struggling startup can relate to this.  I’ve felt this same awkwardness explaining what we do – not so much because we’re struggling but because BPM isn’t exactly a buzzword for the masses or a great conversation starter at social events.  But I’d much rather be telling people about what we do at BP3 as a BPM services firm than, say, a dating site (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

I’ve noticed when I explain how we started BP3, people have assumed that we only left Lombardi at the moment IBM acquired the company.  Not so.  We started BP3 about 2.5, almost 3 years, before IBM acquired Lombardi.  An investor would probably call that being “early”.  It wasn’t about the acquisition or potential acquisition.  It was about starting a company that could be the best BPM services firm we could be.

That 2-3 years was great formative time for us to build our reputation, our culture, our team.  It takes a long time to build the foundations for success – especially when you’re bootstrapping – but people don’t always remember how long it takes.  All of a sudden, it looks like success and they wonder how it materialized out of the blue.  But we’re in it for the long run, and we always were.

In closing, congratuations to Yipit on their “overnight” success!

It is just hard to see how this news, courtesy of Steve Blank, could possibly be bad news:

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the $6.8-billion U.S. government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering – is changing the startup landscape for scientists and engineers. The NSF has announced the Innovation Corps – a program to take the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and turn them into startups. It will train them with a process that embraces experimentation, learning, and discovery.

The NSF will fund 100 science and engineering research projects every year. Each team accepted into the program will receive $50,000.

I feel sure that some will nay-say.  But Steve Blank has documented on his blog how the government has fostered a startup ecosystem before in his Secret History of Silicon Valley series, and this has some of the same feel to it – but with the added impetus of a better way to wrap scientists and researchers brains around the concepts of startup formation.

As a process guy, I’m really impressed with how much the process of “starting up” has been improved upon in just the last decade – and Steve Blank and Eric Ries and others in the Lean Startup movement are behind much of it (too many contributors to name in one post – because it really is a collection of ideas from many people and companies). I’ll continue to follow along as it informs our own growth as a “startup” consulting firm, but also because there are interesting cross-pollination opportunities with the process improvement work we do.

Congrats to Steve Blank, the NSF, and everyone else who was part of making this I-Corps program come true.

Since the beginning of the SXSW-interactive conference, I’ve posted a few times about the Lean Startup sessions and hinted that they might apply to BPM.

Heading into the IBM Impact conference, this feels like the right time to talk about the Lean Startup as it relates to BPM – it provides a decent segue to the topic we will speak on at Impact – “Keeping the Business in BPM“.

Let’s Review What the Lean Startup is All About

It turns out, I’ve written about this before.  But I think it is time to return to the subject with a little more perspective.  The premise behind the lean startup is embodied really well by three charts (click on this link, slides 20-22).  I’ve given each idea my own poor rendition here in the blog since I don’t see a good way to embed a single page from a SlideShare presentation.

Known Problem, Known Solution: Waterfall method

First, Waterfall development techniques were designed around situations when we know the problem really well, and we also know the solution well, and simply have to make sure we deliver a quality result.  It should be no surprise to anyone in the BPM space that this does not describe the typical BPM / Process Improvement project.

Known Problem, Unknown Solution: Agile Method

The second slide shows an innovation over the first: that when the problem is known, but solution unknown – a different technique is required to solve the problem:  Agile development. There have been many proponents of an agile approach to software development, and it is arguably the most accepted methodology among software engineers.  This does not mean, however, that it is always practiced, or practiced well, nor has it infiltrated all IT projects.

Lean Startup: Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

The third slide shows yet another innovation: when the problem is also unknown, the solution is unknown.  At this point, we can’t rely on just documenting the requirements or interviewing the known user base.  We have to apply what Steve Blank coined as “Customer Development” – getting out of the building and talking about our problem hypotheses with customers.  When we get our hypothetical problems and hypothetical solutions in front of customers and discover we’ve “missed” the market, we “Pivot” – that is, take the lessons learned, and adapt what we’re doing to find an addressable market we can actually build a business around.  Essentially, the lean startup keeps iterating and pivoting until it finds a business that it can scale (or until it runs out of money).  Once it finds something to scale, the problem is no longer one of “searching” for a business model and solutions, but one of scaling an operation.

The coupling of the Customer Development process with the Agile Development process has been coined the “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and others.  Why do we call the problem “unknown”? Perhaps you think of course we know what problem we’re attacking – the startup company was formed to solve this particular problem.  That sounds good – but actually startups only THINK they know what their business model will be.  Google thought their model was search.  But it was really targeted advertising delivery, based on Search and alongside search.  Small startups pivot often, but we’ve also seen large companies pivot – as IBM did when it moved to really emphasize its services business.

How is BPM Like the Lean Startup?  “Problem: Unknown”

Some readers should already be seeing a connection between the Lean Startup and BPM.  But it helps to really spell it out.  First, I propose that when you start a BPM project, you only have a hypothesis about your problem and solution.  This is what we mean when we say the problem is “unknown” – that we have a hypothesis but it isn’t proven yet.

How do we know that BPM suffers from this “unknown” Problem situation?

Because the biggest risk to budget, or even success, of BPM projects, is getting the requirements wrong.  As I often tell our team: “No, you’re not going to get good requirements up front for this project. And if you do, they’re probably wrong.” We have to approach projects with an open mind toward how requirements will evolve.

Already, most BPM practitioners approach the solution as an “unknown” or “hypothesized” solution.  This is why, for example, successful BPM projects typically have an Agile, or at the least iterative, approach to BPM development – it allows opportunities for course correction with the Business, getting closer to the “right” solution over the course of several iterations.

BPM Takeaways from the Lean Startup

But, the other side of the coin is that we BPM practitioners need to adopt some of the methods of the Lean Startup and Customer Development:

1. We need to “get outside the building”. For the IT folks developing BPM solutions, this means going outside the IT labs and seeing how the “Business” really operates.  Talk to them.  Observe them.  Read between the lines.  Get their feedback on prototypes and early releases.
2. We need to employ more A/B testing in our solutions. Don’t assume we’ve designed the right improvement to the process – prove it!  A/B testing is de riguer in software circles, but not inside IT shops, and not in process improvement methodology.  But it should be.  I’ve only seen one BPM endeavor really embrace A/B testing – and it was a great success.
3. The unit of progress is learning. This is a core principle of the Lean Startup.  While we’re searching for the right problem to solve, and the right approach to address it, learning is what we want. An A/B test that shows we didn’t move the needle as we wanted to is a success if we have learned a better path forward or avoided a costly dead-end.
4. Shift to Value-Based Delivery over Plan-Based.This means that we have to re-prioritize work throughout the project – to always keep the Delivery team focused on the highest value work.  The plan is your hypothetical plan.  Don’t stick to it when the facts dictate otherwise.
5. Get the Business and the Technical Team working together. Seriously.  Put them in the same space. Or the same room.  Make them part of the same team.  Make it the dream team.  Because when you get the leadership and team right, everything else gets easier.

There is more to it than just this… But if we can just pick up these four things for our BPM projects, we’ll make dramatic progress on improving the process of BPM. It takes leadership to drive these behaviors – but I hope that leadership just needs a little bit of encouragement through education and familiarity with the concepts behind the Lean Startup.

I’ll see many of you at Impact – in our session, I’ll touch on the whys and hows for a business-driven technical team.  And if you read this blog, you’ll have some of the underpinnings behind my part of the talk.  Of course, Lance and Reid have a few interesting points to make too!  Wednesday, April 13, 3:15PM to 4:30PM, In the Venetian – Murano 3205 room: “Wells Fargo – Keeping the ‘Business’ in BPM”

Steve Blank was the star speaker among an incredibly strong cast of speakers at the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW-interactive.  The room was packed, and SXSW volunteers were keeping more people out in the halls to obey fire codes.  There would have been people sitting on stairs and on the floor if allowed.  I guess there were a few of those, but mostly just near the power outlets (people who didn’t have iPads to take notes on).

Steve speaks as well (or better) than he writes.  His talk was engaging and energizing.  He started his talk (and a blog post I’ll quote here, based on the same topic) discussing a quick history of the four waves of startup investing:

• The Golden Age (1970 – 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it’s time.
• Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): “Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability.
• Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.
• The New Bubble: (2011 – 2014): Here we go again….

Not everyone agrees that there is a bubble.  Of course, in order to disarm the “is it a bubble or is it not” discussion, he simply says “if you believe it IS a bubble, then the question is, are the rules different in a bubble than they are otherwise?  Are the rules different now, than they were for the previous ten years?”

It is hard to argue that the rules aren’t different.  Or at least that some tactics that would have been counter-productive or futile before, are now quite effective and productive.

The basic argument is that from 2001 to 2010, the Lean Startup was the way to go – conserving capital, focusing on learning and iterating, and finding a business model that could scale.  As he put it:

Startups began to recognize that they weren’t merely a smaller version of a large company. Rather they understood that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. This meant that startups needed their own tools, techniques and methodologies distinct from those used in large companies. The concepts of Minimum Viable Product and the Pivot entered the lexicon along with Customer Discovery and Validation.

So far so good.  But what has changed in 2011, and going forward toward 2014?

1. Breathtaking scale.  The addressable market for startups is vastly bigger than it once was.  And so is the ability for startups to serve that scale (via Amazon web services, for example). Mark Suster commented on this in his SXSW recap.
2. New Exits.  There are simply better options for startups to exit now, than there have been over the last 10 years.  IPOs are back on the table.  Acquisitions are at higher valuations.  And the companies that are IPO’ing will have real profits and revenue, and massive customer #’s.
3. Better tools are available – AWS, S3, Google App Engine, Rackspace, etc.  These scaling tools weren’t there 10 years ago.  Moreover, developer productivity is up with new tools like Ruby, Rails, etc.

It seems that the key change Steve is advocating for startups is visibility.  That previously, press exposure might have hurt you by locking you into the wrong path, but going forward, press would help you by expanding your user base, and increasing your visibility for potential acquirers.

But of course, all this advice only applies if you believe there is a new Internet bubble.

There were some great quotes in the talk.  My favorite:  “There are no 10 year startups. There are only 2 year startups attached to 8 year failures.”

Steve pulls no punches, but he does deliver his critiques with a smile and sense of humor.

Slideshow, embedded below, also tells the story quite well:

 
There’s also a great Q&A with Steve Blank on GigaOm – in which he discusses how the total available market has exploded in size, and how he believes a great CEO with a great product could have come out of SXSW-interactive highly visible and talked about. In other words, he still sees SXSW as a place where you could launch.

I just read one of Steve Blank’s posts and I just wanted to share my impressions here. Because the internal debate Steve seems to be sharing with us on his blog is not unlike the debate that goes on in BPM circles all the time.  Here’s my comment in its entirety:

Steve, on the one hand, this post is depressing. You seem to be saying that entrepreneurs are born rather than made. That in some sense, this endeavor to teach more people about entrepreneurship is hopeless.

On the other hand, you pointed out not everyone can use these tools equally well. Well good! If they could, what point in striving against all the other people starting businesses if we’re all automatons executing the master plan.

The point is that you can, with the right tools, raise the game of everyone who uses them. With the right education and experience, you can elevate their internal game and process. You can give everyone a tennis racquet, and they won’t all be equally good, even with the same equipment. But you can teach EVERYONE to be better at tennis. I can’t believe you wouldn’t think the same is true for entrepreneurship, management, running a business.
I’m also disheartened to see people referring to science as if it isn’t creative. It is. If it wasn’t, we’d just let the computers do the science and R&D wouldn’t we? The scientific method and the “Pivot” don’t sound terribly different to me.

The Word processor doesn’t make someone an artist- but it has made people who write more productive – allowing, no doubt, more people to get into writing as a side-career rather than starving while they pursue their craft.

Regarding that practice: recall that it has to be practice with a purpose (the learning that goes with the practice, the purposeful working on weaknesses and leveraging strengths). Giving entrepreneurs a better framework and tools gives them a better shot at practice with purpose.

And having said all of that, I find it encouraging that human variance will still mean that some will succeed beyond others. Because individualism still matters too. That sounds like capitalism to me.

Given how many successful businesses there are in the world, perhaps we think this entrepreneur thing is a little bit more rare than it really is.

I think we too easily discount the creativity that everyone doing work exhibits.  We also too easily give up on the idea that other people can improve.  Almost everyone I’ve ever talked to thinks they can improve themselves.  I feel sorry for the folks I talk to who *don’t* seem to have that belief. What Steve Blank is teaching in his classes and through his blog is an improvement over trial-and-error. But, the best entrepreneurs will take great advantage from his concepts and teaching, and the worst entrepreneurs simply won’t.  It will be that way with any improvement tools or teachings. Is it any different in BPM?

I need to write a post explaining why the Lean Startup has relevance to BPM, in a logical, specific way.  But before I do that, I want to get the raw impressions and data I’ve collected from watching sessions at SXSW and then I’ll post my analysis.  Because much of this content is available on the web, the key attraction to the event was to hear it live, rather than Memorex – much of the analysis is the same, but with fresh input.

Eric Ries kicked off the SXSW Lean Startup event with a good introduction to Lean startups.  My notes from the session (rough notes):

• Entrepreneurs are everywhere
• Lean Startup is about Validated Learning:
  • Build
  • Measure
  • Learn
• (scribbled something about innovation)

Next, Eric talked about Scientific Management, and Fred Taylor. On the one hand, a scientific approach to business is generally a good thing, and on the other, his approach falls on its face in startups.  The argument seems to be, that in startups, we would collectively benefit from a more scientific, rigorous approach (rather than the trial and error that often happens, and rather than the waterfall approach we often see).  But also, that scientific approach has to account for the fact that the both the problem and solution are not well-known. Taylor assumes the problem and solution are well understood.

The key idea is the Pivot.  His example:  Groupon was building “petition++” and made a huge pivot to daily deals.  Their first daily deal was for pizza at the pizza place in their building.  A very humble beginning, but also a very useful way to start testing their concept in the real world.

So the goal is to reduce time required to pivot (rephrasing: reduce the time required to learn what you need to know, so that you can pivot effectively sooner rather than later).

The Waterfall/Taylor approach just doesn’t work well in startup land (I had visions of Phil Gilbert’s old bucket brigade slides when I saw Eric’s slides).  Eric points out he was kind of annoyed to find out that even manufacturing doesn’t follow a Tayloristic approach anymore – they’re using Lean.  So why are people teaching software and engineering still teaching this approach that is proven to be wrong?

The problem with a waterfall approach: Achieving failure, on time, on budget, with high quality, good design.  Only one problem:  wrong product.

Deming and Ohno put the focus on the customer, and lean manufacturing as the way to get there.

Customer Develment + Agile Development

Agile Development was a big improvement to delivery models for software companies.  But even agile doesn’t work well, by itself, in startups.  It needed to be paired up with Customer Development (Steve Blank’s process for hypothesis testing your business model, at right).  Meanwhile, it becomes clearer when to employ the two key parts of a lean startup: the approach to unknown problems, and the approach to unknown solutions…

Unknown Problem, Unknown Solution

Not that executing these two models is necessarily easy, but it sure is a whole lot easier to do right if you know which situation you’re in.  If your problem is known, and solution is unknown, Agile development is a good choice. But if your problem is unknown as well, then you need to employ the customer development process to dig into what problem you’re really solving.

Eric described the cycles at IMVU, by way of example. And explained that the “pivot” is one cycle through the “build-measure-learn” loop.  A great quote was that “learning is the fundamental measure of progress” in a lean startup – not revenue, or users, or any other metric that a typical board might latch on to.

Translating to BPM terms: The pivot in business process management would be when we take what we learned from our last process improvement, measure what is really happening, and identify the new opportunities and tackle those.  In BPM we’re not pivoting the company hypothesis, just the hypothesis for where the bang-for-the-buck is in the process.

I particularly like his coverage of Lean myths:

1. Lean means cheap. On the contrary, lean is about speed much more than about cost.
2. Lean Startup is only for Web2.0 style companies. Actually, Lean Startup applies to all companies that face uncertainty in what the customers will want.
3. Lean Startups are bootstrapped. In fact, many lean startups are ambitious and can deploy large amounts of capital (see, Groupon).
4. Lean Startups replace vision with data. Actually, lean startups test the vision with real data. They still require vision!

Eric’s talk was followed by case studies on pivots by Pascal Louis-Perez (Wealthfront), Ash Maurya (USERcycle), Parker Thompson (Pivotal Labs).

Perhaps the most interesting nugget from these three case studies, with respect to the customers BP3 works with – was Pascal’s presentation on Wealthfront.  His company processes manages over $180MM.  And yet they have a continuous deployment setup – meaning they deploy changes to production as much as 30 times a day.  Their company puts lie to the idea that a highly regulated industry with very important financial outcomes can’t adopt a continuous deployment development model.  I’m not advocating that every Fortune 500 company do the same with BPM – but clearly there is a happy middle-ground between 18-month roll-outs and 30 times a day…  And whatever your number of days between deployments is, we should be looking at ways to reduce that number.

Ash Maurya was up next (slides here), and I admit to being surprised when he presented the use of kan ban boards to visualize the workflow of feature ideas (this is, truly, treating development of product as something that can be measured and improved and understood). He advocated moving only so fast as you can learn or aid the process of learning – that moving faster than that, or slower than that, amounts to waste (a big no-no in Lean thinking).

Parker Thompson, of Pivotal, advocated having a vision, but being humble and pragmatic in the near term.  If testing with users or customers proves that your vision isn’t getting traction, don’t assume you have the wrong test subjects, be willing to revisit your hypothesis and test different ideas.

The Lean Startup is a phenomenon.  Day 2 proved it.  Day 2 was not a typical SXSW experience. Instead of scrambling all over downtown Austin to get to sessions, I stayed in one place all day at the lovely AT&T Center.  Eric Ries (@ericries) acted as emcee for the all-day event, which was literally packed wall-to-wall with people and content all day long.

I took copious notes throughout the day.  This day’s sessions were the highlight for me.  The concepts in lean startups and minimum viable product are so relevant for BPM, and not as well understood by our BPM community as you might think. After all, the Lean Startup is focused on areas where the problem is unknown or uncertain, and the solution is also unknown.  In BPM, we face a similar problem – it might be more accurate to say that the problems are “estimated” and the solution is “estimated” – but the point is, we don’t know for sure that we’re solving the right problem before we start the BPM journey, and we don’t know for sure that each solution we iterate is the right solution.  It takes iterations of customer discovery and agile development to get us to a better hypothesis about the problem and solution.  If this sounds like crazy talk, bear with me and read blog posts I’ll put up over the next few days that dig into this further.

Overall the sessions violated one aspect of the spirit of SXSW – there were very few breaks (I counted 2, and one was 30 minutes for lunch), no time for hallway conversation, and no breaks to get out of your middle row seat so that you could have such a hallway conversation.  All of these fantastic entrepreneurs in one space, one room, and we could hardly talk, except via the backchannel of twitter and the like. I think it only worked at SXSW because the sessions were at the AT&T Conference Center, far removed from the center of gravity for SXSW, the Austin Convention Center.

The content was first rate, and there’s too much for one blog post to cover!  But they could have split some of the sessions into two rooms to really make the feel more like SXSW.  It would have forced choices – you can’t go to everything- but the choices would have been good choices, and twitter and blogs allow us to follow content in another session if we’re motivated to. And it would have allowed the schedule to BREATHE a little bit.  Trust me, it needed it.  Finally, it would have allowed for the people who couldn’t get into the sessions in the afternoon to actually participate or watch at least a relevant session, if not the one they were hoping for.  I felt that there was a lot of value pent up in the entrepreneurs in the room, that wasn’t unlocked because there just wasn’t any time at all for the sidebar conversations.

Eric “Pivot” Ries was the emcee, but we had significant appearances and contribution from Dave “Nice to #$@!ing meet you!” McClure , Steve “Epiphany” Blank, and many other entrepreneurs.  My favorite talk, and the one that I was most looking forward to, was Steve Blank’s discussion of new rules for the new bubble.  For this session, even more than the others, it was standing room only, with people sitting on the floors and standing in the hall to listen in.

I had the good fortune of meeting up with fellow Austin entrepreneurs while I was there-  Jeff Chambers, and Ed Roman.  I also spent most of the day sitting with Elliot Loh (@elliotloh) visiting from SF.

Later I got to introduce a couple of my friends from out of town to Garridos, a great modern Mexican restaurant downtown.  We also checked out the Frog Design SXSW Opening party, which, as usual, involved some crazy technical and interactive features, as well as massive lines to get in.

Day 2 was an incredibly long day, with so many notes I knew I couldn’t hope to get my blog up-to-date by the time I finished the day.

The main takeaways:

1. The Lean Startup movement is grounded in real empirical data, real case studies, and real results.  It is no longer an “interesting idea” and seems to be on its way to being accepted as the “best way” to approach starting up your company.
2. Entrpreneurs, investors, and academics from the Bay Area believe there is a sort of “bubble” in investing.  On the other hand, they also believe that the companies likely to go public now are companies that have real scale and make real money.
3. There’s an incredible interest among entrepreneurs to improve their game – especially the ones that are building their companies with minimal or no outside investment.
4. SXSW-interactive has the power to draw an amazing group of people to one spot, to even one room, in Austin, TX.

If they had added an after-party on-site, or a good strong networking break, this would have been the key place to be on Saturday.  As it was, it was the key place to be but no one else would know you were there, and you’d have to track down your like-minded entrepreneurs later in the conference (good luck finding them!).

Every so often, a conversation builds to critical mass and demands an in-person meet-up.  Eric Ries pulled this show together, and I have to say there is some great video, and there were some great presentations to browse to get to understand better what you can do with a lean-startup approach.

Steve Blank has one of the best overviews with links to all the important content.  And here’s a link to the stream of his talk.  You can find almost all of the presentations on slideshare with the sllconf tag.

Maybe I relate to this conference effort because we put on the bpmCamp unconference earlier this year.  Mainly, I applaud the effort to build momentum and credibility around some really great frameworks.