Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah (Part 9)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

John: My favorite situation is when I have a founder who is strong in technology, but also has enough business acumen to be the CEO. That is when we have the strongest team, where you’ve got a tech person who’s essentially the CEO/CTO.

The first 12 to 18 months of a company’ life needs to be very focused on customer validation and MVP [minimum viable product].

That’s when that CTO/CEO combination person is just fantastic. We only have one or two of our 10 companies this year that falls in that boat. Both of them are doing extraordinarily well, because you have the high commitment of a CEO who is also a civil engineer. That’s beautiful.

Irina: Is there anything you would like to add?

John: This year – we didn’t have it in as much last year – we’ve adopted the Steve Blank, Alex Osterwalder, Eric Ries type of thinking with lean startups and customer validation [that I mentioned before].

I’ve gotten to know Steve Blank. I’m a professional educator the way he is. Steve Blank came out to Utah in January 2011. I put on a meeting where 400 people from the ecosystem here attended.

We’ve really adopted that lean startup philosophy, and it’s really helped. The way we run our program is we have a three-month program.

The first month, we make sure that their customer validation and their pivot from their hypothesis to their nailed-down business model is done.

We spend the second month building their minimum viable product. In the third month, we focus on their getting ready for investor pitches and planning to scale the company.

We’re devotees of Steve Blank, Alex Osterwalder, that entire movement. For me, that framework has explained my 15 active years as an angel investor when I’ve won and lost. I wish I would have known these principles and things 15 years ago. I would have saved a lot of money.

Irina: Thank you, John. Very insightful.

This segment is part 9 in the series : Business Incubator Series: John Richards, BoomStartup, Provo, Utah
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