Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched –Startup Weekend Next. A partnership of Startup Weekend, Startup America, TechStars and Udacity, Startup Weekend Next brings four weeks of amazing hands-on training learning to build your startup to cities around the world. Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups.
The Lean LaunchPad Class
You may have read my previous postsabout the Lean LaunchPadentrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. Just a crazy idea two years ago, the class is now taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech, Princeton and for the National Science Foundationat the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech.
And in the thirty days since we’ve put the Lean LaunchPad class online at Udacity – 50,000 students have been taking it.
While the Lean LaunchPad online has received rave reviews (it’s being translated into Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese and Greek, and it’s being used as part of a “flipped classroom” in other entrepreneurship courses), it’s different than taking the class in person. It doesn’t require you to form a team, and there’s no immediate instructor feedback. More importantly, it makes no demands of you to stand and deliver your weekly customer development progress in front of your peers. In sum, it lacks the rigorous and collaborative hands-on experience that entrepreneurs get in our university classes.
We thought long and hard about how we could take the Lean LaunchPad Online to the next level and deliver the same level of experiential instruction to tens and hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world.
The result – Startup Weekend Next.
Hands-On in 100’s of Cities
Startup Weekend Next is a four-week version of the Lean LaunchPad class withhands-on instructors and mentors – and we will teach it in hundreds of cities around the world.
I’m partnered with four great organizations to deliver the program. The class is organized, led and delivered by Startup Weekend, the global non-profit that teaches entrepreneurs how to launch a startup in 54 hours. They’ve hosted close to 800 Startup Weekend events in over 350 cities worldwide educating a staggering 57,000 entrepreneurs who’ve created over 5,000 startups. Today they are going to take Startup Weekend to the next level by organizing and teaching a four-week version of the Lean LaunchPad class as their Startup Weekend Next course. Their reach and scale means our goal of helping to create 10,000 startups is within our grasp.
(If you can’t see the video above click here.)
In addition, the leading experts in building entrepreneurial companies and regions, TechStars and Startup America are partnering with us in this endeavor.
In the U.S, Startup America will leverage its network of 30 startup regions to engage entrepreneurial leaders throughout the country. And TechStars will use its broad andunparalleled network of mentors (experienced entrepreneurs and investors) to coach the teams. And Udacity has put their awesome production resources behind the class and hosts the Lean LaunchPad online lectures. And we are looking for other partners worldwide to help make this successful.
The first four-week Startup Weekend Next classes will start on Nov. 28 in more than 25 cities worldwide. The program expands to all of Startup Weekend’s 350 member communities in 2013 where it will be offered up to five times a year in each city.
The cost of attending a Startup Weekend Next is ridiculously inexpensive. It doesn’t take equity and just has a small fee that varies by city ($140 to $299), to cover event operations and expenses.
How it Works
We now know how to crack the entrepreneurial code by creating an Entrepreneurship API - a standard language for entrepreneurs. When you leave the class, you’ll know how to think about your startup in the now standard “language” of the business model canvas. You’ll understand the customer development process used to test those hypotheses and learn how to iterate or pivot when your hypotheses need to change. And you’ll learn about how to build a minimal viable product to get feedback early and often from customers.
Here’s how the four intense weeks in a Startup Weekend Next class works.
- You form a startup team (if you don’t have one, taking the 54-hour Startup Weekend class is a great a way to find one) and come into class with an initial idea
- Your team arrives with an initial Business Model Canvas. (Your pre-class reading is to watch the Lean LaunchPad initial lectures on Udacity)
- You present your hypotheses and what you learned in front of your peers and coaches
- Your team gets live coaching and advice from Startup Weekend Next mentors.
- You’ll take the suggestions from the meeting, get out of the building and talk to ten plus customers per week.
- You’ll refine your business model by iterating or pivoting your product, your target customers, pricing, channels, partners, etc.
- Repeat for four weeks– all while working with volunteer mentor partners from Startup Weekend, Startup America and TechStars – serial entrepreneurs and seasoned startup investors – to see whether your business idea was truly a vision or simply a hallucination.
The Big Idea – Incubators – Accelerators – and Something New
In the last decade startup incubators have become increasingly popular. These incubators which provides new startups with year-round physical office space, infrastructure and advice in exchange for a fee (often in equity.) 
They may be privately run but often are non-profit, attached to a university or in some locations a local government. There is no formal “start date” so there is a no fixed time for their stay. (For some incubators, entrepreneurs can stay as long as they want.) There is no curriculum and seldom any formal instructors or mentors. There is no guaranteed funding. Think of incubators as “shelter from the storm.”
In contrast, the goal of an accelerator is not physical office space, it’s a fundable company. 
Startups enter and leave as a cohort (starting and ending the program at the same time) in a program of a set length. While there is no formal curriculum, most offer weekly expert lectures, experienced mentors, coaching and introductions. Accelerators provide funding at the end of the program. Getting into an accelerator is more competitive than grad school.
Startup Weekend Next represents something new – a pre-accelerator.
Like an accelerator there is no physical office space, and startups enter and leave as a cohort in a program of a set length. But the key difference is that Startup Weekend Next engages you in a formal curriculum. We believe we know what startups need to learn, and we focus on teaching you that.
Instead of guest lecturers, you get out of the building and you learn by doing. Like the best accelerators, you get experienced mentors, coaching and introductions. Unlike accelerators, there is no funding at the end of the program. But you leave knowing a lot more of what it takes to build a company beyond a PowerPoint deck for a VC presentation.
Lessons Learned
- Startup Weekend Next – four weeks in hundreds of cities
- Starts Nov 28th
- You’ll learn about working with a team
- You’ll learn about the business model canvas.
- You’ll understand the customer development process
- You’ll learn about how to build a minimal viable product
If you have passion, an idea and a team, and you want to take advantage of the most advanced entrepreneurial training program, sign up at Startup Weekend Next…
and wait until you see what we do next.
