A Path to the Minimum Viable Product
b'I first met Shawn Carolan and his wife Jennifer at the turn of the century at 11,000 feet. I was hiking with my kids between the Yosemite High Sierra camps. Having just retired from a career as an entrepreneur I had started thinking about why startups were different from large companies. The ideas were bouncing around my head so hard that I shared them with these strangers around a campfire, drawing out the four steps with a stick in the dirt. Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing \\u2013 I had called it market development \\u2013 he suggested that I call it Customer Development \\u2013 and the name stuck. What I didn\\u2019t realize was that both were graduate students at Stanford and later both would become great VCs \\u2013 Shawn at Menlo Ventures and Jennifer at Reach Capital. (And Jennifer is now my co-instructor in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class.)'