Pivot: How Top Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

Chapter 12

Validated Learning = Knowledge

As we discussed in the previous chapter, learning leads to knowledge. Ultimately, as entrepreneurs we want to launch a startup that will succeed. I was speaking with a former corporate vice president—a man with a considerable wealth of experience as a corporate executive and an angel investor. I will refer to him as Steve, as he is a very private person and I do not wish to impose on his privacy. Anyway, Steve and I were having a discussion on what startups should be focused on. In the past, I have heard Steve lecture on the importance of focus and execution, and while I always agreed with him on that, I disagreed with his take on what the focus should be on. Steve was always concerned with focusing on one market and looking at the bottom line. He tried to impose corporate management techniques on startups, which I believe led to many failures. Instead, as we have discussed throughout the book, the focus needs to be on building knowledge about customers, markets, team, capital, labor, and product. The approach should be centered on testing the validity of the most important assumptions.

The Pivot Startup approach discussed in Chapter 11 is a structured approach that an entrepreneur can use to construct knowledge. I am not proposing that this is the only approach, as I am always disappointed by books that tout their approach as the only viable option. Instead, I suggest that this structured approach has been vetted by over a decade's worth ...