Flex Your Idea Muscle

Most folks have entrepreneurship all wrong. The image of the thrill-seeking, risk-junkie are a far cry from reality. Instead of being risk seeking, the best entrepreneurs are actually risk eliminating. They are risk-killers.

Yesterday, Perry Klebahn and I, alongside our illustrious collaborator Bob Sutton, launched the twelfth cohort of founders into their LaunchPad journey. The class has become a gauntlet of sorts for many aspiring entrepreneurs at Stanford, and from the outset, students are eager to know how they can bend the odds of success. Our answer is simple.

The distinguishing feature of every LaunchPad founder is a capacity to craft scrappy experiments. The very best way to beat the odds facing any novel idea or venture is to become fluent in the mindset and tools of experimentation. Almost every single assignment throughout the course leverages experiments to create meaningful data.

But here’s the catch: to design a good experiment, you need ideas. Ideas are the lifeblood of experiments. So a robust experimentation practice demands a rigorous ideation ritual. We require aspiring entrepreneurs to build their ideation muscles through a daily “idea quota” — where each day, they consider any problem facing their business (could be sales, could be product, could be marketing, could be an operational issue, etc), and instead of trying to think of “the” answer, they force themselves to generate at least ten.

Requesting alternatives has long been a tactic of design professors at Stanford. We’ve just codified the approach and expanded its relevance to any idea problem our founders face. And every problem is an idea problem.

Related: Consider the Odds
Related: Request Options
Related: The Dynamic Duo: Ideas and Experiments

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