Alchemist Customer Development Series

My wife told me about a course on Customer Development and Metrics from the Alchemist Series with the Citrix Accelerator that starts on March 13th. I realized Steve Blank will be teaching, so I signed up in a heart beat! It’s a very special course because it is a small group of students learning from top-notch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VC’s. This particular course is being prepared as a lecture series for the top 30 universities, so we get to ask lots of questions from the best and be a part of some stellar new curriculum. It’s not full.  If you want in, visit the link above and get your butt there.

Last night’s session was with Alan Chiu, principle with X/Seed Capital Management. It was a super interesting session. For the business I am working on inside of Intuit, I got solid advice for scrappy/crafty ways of finding customers to interview, knowing when to experiment for design vs. price, knowing when to build, etc. More posts coming on those later. One of my big takeaways was that my previous main two questions are now three.

  1. What question are you trying to answer?
  2. What’s the fastest way to answer it?
  3. What’s the cheapest way to get it answered?
I’ll use these questions the rest of my working life.

Be responsible for everything in your life

Each time I find I’m irritated at something that’s happened to me, I can’t help but realize that I put myself in that place. If I’m unhappy because of a little yapping dog in my house, I have to acknowledge that I let that little rat into my house. If I’m unhappy because I’m not successful at work, I have to acknowledge that everything at work I’ve done I’ve done.  It wasn’t some manager to blame for not deciding to put me up for promotion. It was my actions prior that led to how I was perceived by the entire group of people around and above me. Either I wasn’t working in the right way or not working on the right things. These were choices that I made along the way. Likely, I wasn’t thinking big enough. If I want to be successful at work or anything, I need to be very specific on the aspect of successful I want and then move in that direction with an unstoppable drive. I need to change my actions to those that will create success.
Being responsible means thinking things through. Thinking things through helps you know if you will create something that helps you or injures you in the future.  We live with the choices we make whether they are conscious or not.