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0:00
My name is Ted Ladd.
I'm a professor of
entrepreneurship and
innovation at
the Hult International
Business School based on
its campus in San
Francisco, as well as
a visiting instructor of
innovation at Harvard
University in Cambridge.
This case talks about
the importance of the
lean startup method,
but instead of promoting
a victorious outcome from
the lean startup method,
I'm going to highlight
a cautionary tale
from my own experiences.
0:34
Several years ago I
joined a company called
WIMM Labs and we
made a smartwatch.
We did this with a few
extra interesting nuances.
First, we did not just
want to be considered
a smartwatch,
we wanted to be in the
wearables category
which is much larger
and more significant.
As a result, the device
we made could pop
in and out of a
smartwatch band so that
the device itself could be
mounted on handlebars or on
a hospital bed or on a uniform
to increase the use case.
1:10
The startup in Silicon Valley
had several strengths.
Several aspects that provided
some tailwind to
accelerate our success.
First, we were comprised of
a team of veterans
from Silicon Valley.
All of us had been engaged
in the design, manufacture,
launch and growth
of companies that
created consumer electronic
goods with great success.
Secondly, we were blessed
with investment from
a large consumer electronics
manufacturer based
in China. This
megalithic company makes
one or two investments a year in
startups that will produce
consumer electronics,
and it gave us three
different things.
The first was cash
investment which
was important for
our own survival.
The second was that
this Chinese company created
a separate factory just to
manufacture our smartwatch
product, and it even provided
materials for free for
the construction
of the prototypes.
Third, this company provided
software coders to us.
When the 20 of us in
Silicon Valley went
home for the night,
300 software engineers in China
would work through our source
code in order to debug it.
When we would arrive
back to the office in
the morning, we had fresh
code that would run well.
