Who, Exactly, Is and Entrepreneur

• The biggest surprise is that they are visionaries. They can see the future of their industries and are prepared to take bold risks to seek out new and innovative solutions to the problems their companies face.

If I'm an Entrepreneur, What's a Startup

• A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
• Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, a nonprofit, or a decidedly for-profit company with financial investors.
• In every case, the organization is dedicated to uncovering a new source of value for customers and cares about the impact of its product on those customers.
• There is one more important part of this definition: the context in which the innovation happens. Most businesses large and small alike are excluded from this context. Startups are designed to confront situations of extreme uncertainty.

The Snaptax Story

• In 2009, a startup decided to try something really audacious. They wanted to liberate taxpayers from expensive tax stores by automating the process of collecting information typically found on W-2 forms.
• After numerous conversations with potential customers, the team lit upon the idea of having customers take photographs of the forms directly from their cell phone.
• In the process of testing this concept, customers asked something unexpected: would it be possible to finish the whole tax return right on the phone itself?
• What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit’s senior management. Their executive sponsors created an “island of freedom” where they could experiment as necessary.
• Innovation is a bottoms-up , decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed. It can, but to do so requires a new management discipline, one that needs to be mastered. In other words, cultivating entrepreneurship is the responsibility of senior management.

A Seven-Thousand-Person Lean Startup

• In 1983, Intuit’s founder, the legendary entrepreneur Scott Cook, had the radical notion (with cofounder Tom Proulx) that personal accounting should happen by computer. Their success was far from inevitable.
• Flash-forward to 2002. Cook was frustrated. He had just tabulated ten years of data on all of Intuit’s new product introductions and had concluded that the company was getting a measly return on its massive investments. Simply put, too many of its new products were failing.
• He came to a difficult conclusion: the prevailing management paradigm he and his company had been practicing was inadequate to the problem of continuous innovation in the modern economy.
• Over the course of the year, the marketing and product teams would conceive one major initiative that would be rolled out just in time for tax season. Now they test over five hundred different changes in a two-and-a-half-month tax season. They’re running up to seventy different tests per week. The team can make a change live on its website.
• When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run . And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians in the company.
• The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers. There are many business leaders who have been successful because of analysis. They think they’re analysts, and their job is to do great planning and analyzing and have a plan.