Takeaways: Escape the City – Startup MBA

I just finished the first offering of the Escape the City Startup MBA, which was a 2 weekend course on lean startup methodologies. The purpose of the course was to set you up with the knowledge and resources you needed to start your own business successfully, or at least to point you in the right direction.

The course was sold as a great way to learn from some industry experts in a focused way that filters through all the crap you might learn in your first year or two floundering and figuring out how to build at startup company. The idea is to give you a good foundation and help you get rolling on your own ideas in a fast, efficient way.

As someone who’s already “escaped” my job and who is looking into the startup environment and the possibility of starting my own business, this course was perfect for me. Of course, I think it would have been even more beneficial to me if I actually had an idea for a business already in mind and had made a little bit of headway (though not much! I learned a lot of ways to cut out waste in the early stages!).

There were about 30 people in the course, with a diverse spectrum of backgrounds, industries, and progress towards starting their own company. We had a really good cross section of folks, some from banking, some lawyers, some from teaching, some from government, a few randoms from food, tools, and then me, from art/media. The first night we spent giving a 4 minute introduction of ourselves, and I got more than a few bizarre looks and questions as to my mental health after saying I quit my job working on movies!

The one group that was not represented in the course, not at all surprisingly, was tech. I suppose that most technical folks who want to go start their own thing just go build it. That said, if I was a software engineer or developer that had been working for a larger company and was thinking about building my own tech startup, this course would have been SUPER useful – perhaps even more so than to any of us in the room. I was probably one of the more technical people in the room (coming from a CS degree and having experience with the web and web apps, etc.), but I would never really consider being a developer for my own company (at least not in the mid-to-long term). However, I feel like the group that may have been best served from this course could well have been developers.

Why should developers and software engineers bother with a course like this? Tons of reasons, but the most important one is this: developers love to go build stuff, and they often lose track of the goal, or think the goal is to finish the product, or write as much code as possible as fast as possible. But the biggest takeaway I learned in this course is that the goal is NOT the final product. The goal is LEARNING!

Validated learning is the goal, and although developers who are rarin’ to go and develop their brilliant tech product could get this information from The Lean Startup, the course delivered so much more.

The lead instructor on the course, Rob Fitzpatrick, was absolutely brilliant. Quirky, knowledgable, fun, and full of interesting stories – Rob had an amazing grip on the entire classroom when he was going through his startup experiences and the ins-and-outs of building a business from scratch. I could gush on and on and wax poetic about Rob, but you can read all of his blog posts for yourself. I highly recommend that you listen to him speak if you get a chance!!!

Here are the top things I learned from the course, in fairly random order based on what comes out of my head first:

• Startups can’t measure their progress in conventional ways, so should measure their progress in terms of validated learning.
• De-risk EVERYTHING as much as you can. You’re building something that by definition is uncertain, so you need to break things down into testable units to learn as much as you can as quickly and cheaply as you can.
• You have to build something to really understand it. You can read a bunch of blogs, think about things, and study up as much as you want, but until you try to build something, you haven’t really learned anything yet.
• Using the Business Model Canvas is a super useful way to quickly iterate on business ideas – you could come up with hundreds of ideas and quickly start validating (or invalidating) them using this model.
• There’s a tool (usually a SAAS tool) that exists for almost everything these days that can help you do something smarter/faster/more efficiently. Know what’s going on in the tech world, as these things can save you days, weeks, months of time.
• There’s only 2 legal things you really need to worry about getting right: (1) Own your own code (and other IP), and (2) settle the stock issue between founders. Everything else can be fixed later. Oh, and always read your contracts.
• Get advisors! Depending on what you need, you should try to get tech, industry, or strategy advisors on board to help you out. And make sure you trust them.
• Utilize your skills/experience as much as you can: it’s what makes your idea unique. What qualifies you to start this business in a way that no one else could?
• Working alone is a drag. If it’s possible, have a co-founder. Or at least have a “business buddy” you can bounce ideas off of so you’re not sitting alone with your laptop in bed all the time.
• Take time for physical health. We all know this (duh), but seriously. No, really.

And possibly the most important thing I learned (personally) in these 2 weekends:

• Push as hard as you can part-time, while still working and supporting yourself on someone else’s dime. 

This one was a massive surprise to me. I figured that if I just quit my job and had nothing else to get in the way and interrupt my genius brain, the ideas would flow and a bazillion dollar idea would just come to me. I’ve been having trouble figuring out why I’m having so much trouble with this part, since I have all the mental capacity in the world just waiting to be activated with my brilliant business idea, but it just hasn’t worked like that for me.

So, for me, I came out of this course with a lot more knowledge, but my first point of action is to UN-escape the city and get back into a paying job. It’s ironic that it took going to an event put on by a company called “Escape the City” to realize that for me, right now, that’s not what I need.

My plan: get a short-term or freelance gig to keep my brain more activated and my wallet more fat. Start saving. Keep learning. But, perhaps more importantly, start positioning myself in a way that once I have an idea I can take advantage of it! Start creating a tribe, work on setting up a network of trusted advisors, start learning the specific skills I’ll need. And once I actually have a valid idea that I think I want to start on, then start it! Just do it! Create an MVP and get dirty. BUT do all this while still working. Keep working until it’s just not possible/plausible anymore – until my time would be better spent on my startup business than working for my paying gig (whatever that might be).

So, all in all, I think it was £500 well spent for 5 solid days of instruction. The people I met, the information that got crammed into my head, and the realization that it’s okay (in fact, it’s GOOD) to keep your day job while you’re figuring things out – all of these things made this a really excellent course, and perfect for me at this point in my career/life.

Thanks, Escape the City. And many, many thanks, Rob.