15.392  Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures

Optional Class Tonight -- Meet in Regular Classroom

Hi 15.392 Cohort,

We wanted to remind everyone that we have a final "informal" class tonight. The class is fully optional - no attendance will be taken. It will be a casual chat about the semester, teams' progress, and last week's presentations.

We will meet in our normal room at 5:30pm.

-Sam

Announced on 16 May 2017  2:16  p.m. by Samuel McElhinney

Submit Course Evaluation

Hi All,

Please make sure to fill out the class evaluation so that 15.392 can continue improving from this year to next. If time allots, we will give everyone 10 min at the end of class to submit responses.

The link is here: http://web.mit.edu/subjectevaluation/evaluate.html

Thank you!

Announced on 11 May 2017  5:10  p.m. by Samuel McElhinney

15.392 Final Project Update

Hi 15.392 Teams,

Below you will find information on when your final projects are due and the order in which you will be presenting.

Regardless of when your team is presenting, all final presentations and papers are to be submitted via Stellar at 11:59pm on 5/8/17.

Presentation Order:

5/9/17
Play Business
Waypoint Labs
Pirca
Flutter
Peerpads

5/11/17
Care Mobile
SigmaRatings
Alba
Dare to Innovate
BlockParty
GetRid

Announced on 04 May 2017  1:19  p.m. by Samuel McElhinney

Updated Office Hours

Hi All,

Please note that the optional team office hours with Donna have been updated. You can use the same google spreadsheet to sign up. Link below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CVKrpKmO1UnFK2Vcy0QHPZQJzISBn_Tt7qMapWiWOoA/edit#gid=280918390

Announced on 26 April 2017  10:58  a.m. by Samuel McElhinney

Notes from Trish Cotter Talk on Scaling Operations

Hi All,

Please find Trish's followup notes below. Her deck is also uploaded on Stellar.

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1. Reviewed what you learned at HubSpot and I heard how sophisticated the tools are, that the company uses the tools so they understand what the customer experience is, how they pivoted when they got it wrong, culture and saw Brians leadership style –there were others
2. We went over what the biggest challenge you have—the biggest because you need to make sure you allocate time and resources to solving the big issues and putting them to bed. Know where you are spending your time. What is taking up 80% of your time and what is taking up 20%...are you spending too much or too little on key items
3. You have done personal lens…then the leadership lens…really key to scaling your business is understanding the value prop so you can create structure around your strategy and you have people who are agile as you grow. You need a vocabulary and you need to be laser focused on what is important. For us at Netezza it was Performance, Simplicity and Value (Terabytes/$) for customers. Employees knew we couldn’t have long sales contracts, supplier contracts, etc..they had to be simple…we claimed we had a performance machine and we had to deliver that and in engineering that meant code that could scale and results returned were reliable, value meant decisions on feature etc had to be taken with price/terabyte, supplier decisions etc. If we were simple to do business with our service had to be easy to do business with so that meant no checking of contract, competent people that could solve the problems and when there was a problem at a customer everyone that could help did.
4. We talked about Ryanair a company everyone knew…what were their values and how did they compete on those values…
5. We mapped your values against your competition and heard that words matter and how you define them maybe open to interpretation by your employees, customers and investors…so be very clear on your value prop and be very clear on who you are competing against. I appreciate that you all pushed each other on this.
6. How did those values turn a value chain of key deliverables for Ryanair company and had you start filling out what it would mean to your venture. You realized with more people there are more opinions and that doing it alone is tough as well. The earlier you have these discussions the better you will do with onboarding of people. Each hour, each $ should be laser focused on what needs to be done to succeed in the business. (we were short on time on this sorry about that but as a team you should have a dialog on where you are now and what the aspirational goals are)
7. We went over the Netezza dashboard and there is a software dashboard in the deck but there are plenty of templates etc. on line. Don’t recreate the wheel --you need to sit with each organization and make sure the measurement system is correct. Dashboard comes from the top and signals what the key metrics are for the company.
8. We also had a conversation on what your metrics will be …People, Product, Process, Prospects and Process..find something from the beginning that you feel covers the major aspects of the business. Alignment of the metrics---when aligned for the company, organization and employee has everyone working on the same priorities and they understand their contribution.
9. As far as backend and systems..if folks are living your values ---ease of use etc…then picking the systems to improve productivity is much easier.
10. Lastly, I told a story about how we got kicked out of Orange, Brian told you how he recovered at HubSpot, Natalie told you about Happier…so if you have stories of fun, key obstacles you have over come etc…document them so you can use them as examples for future employees. I can tell you the Orange story happen when we had 25 -30 people and it took the entire company to turn the situation around….when we sold to IBM we had 600 people but every single employee could tell you who our first customer was…because letting everyone know the customer experience was the #1 priority

I also brought an operations plan and an operations budget for review…if anyone wants to take a look it is in the center (Sigma Ratings took a copy)…but the goal is to look 10-100X bigger than you are when you are starting out but you have to be able to articulate the vision and out hustle your competition..one way to do that is have everyone singing from the same hymnal!

Announced on 21 April 2017  10:23  a.m. by Samuel McElhinney