User-driven product development straight from Silicon Valley

It is difficult to travel any great length with dignity, and we arrived at SFO on Sunday evening in a crumpled state, but in high spirits and with most of our belongings still with us. I must say that Sheraton Palo Alto is the least appealing 4-star hotel that I've ever booked against my will. Most of it was covered in scaffolding, building dust, or both. The location was excellent though, we just had to cross the road and we were at Stanford, where the first work session was held. The theme of the Born Global program is user-driven product development, and Henrik Berglund from Chalmers talked us through the week’s intensive schedule.

Next up was a lecture and tour at the Tesla Factory. If you ask them, they deliver "uncompromising electrical vehicles", meaning that they build electrical cars with performance similar to, and in some senses surpassing, regular cars in the same price class. Their approach to development is apparently to either use standard components the way they are intended, or to build the components themselves from scratch. What they don't do (anymore!) is to adapt existing components for new purposes. They tried that, but found that it cost them more than it saved. The tour around the factory was very impressive for one who hasn't seen an automobile production line before. Tesla have invested heavily in versatile Kuka robots (yes, yes, an unfortunate name), and named them after superheroes; Wolverine, Iceman, Cyclops, etc. It was like a strange future zoo, filled with preening and polishing robots.

On Tuesday, Cindy Alvarez from KiSSMetrics talked to us about how to conduct customer interviews, in a way that doesn't just serve to cement your own assumptions and prejudices. The takeaway there was to ask open-ended questions, and let the interviewee lead the way. If something is important to your customer, it's probably important to you too. After that, we set of to the venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, where Morgan Beller told us about their work. Each year, some 10 000 startups knock at their door, and they turn away 9 950. They tend to favour startups in which most, if not all, founders are engineers, and that either has an extensive user base or implies some form of technological break through. In the latter case, Beller and her colleagues can step in and provide all that is missing to make the venture a success, such as marketing, sales channels, etc. I'm not sure whether Silicon Valley is a good place to work, but I think Beller is an excellent person to be.

On Tuesday evening Andreas and I participated in a pitch event at the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce. Thanks to a happy rift in the time-space continuum, we won Best Pitch and were reward with a bottle of wine.

On Wednesday we were invited to AirBnB in San Francisco to hear Gustaf Alströmmer talk about Growth. The company was founded by a trio of flatmates who let conference guests rent air mattresses in their living room, so that they could pay their own rent. After a while, they realized that there were probably other living rooms and more mattresses to put into service, and from there their business grew. Two random bits of wisdom was that half of the secret is to simply survive the first hard years, and that once you have one hundred customers that love what you do, you're set. The next item on the agenda was Tristian Kromer who talked to us about lean startups, using a lullabies-for-dogs enterprise for illustration.

On Thursday Lilia Shirman taught us the noble art of pitching your product to a customer. Apparently, it is not enough to list all it's technical features and then sit back and let your facts work their magic. No. You must tell a story that begins at the product, but that gradually comes to relate to the customer, and is eventually all about his or her pains and profits. Shirman's wacky example was how to sell chocolate bars to call centers. After lunch, Christofer Karltorp told us about his experience of starting zerply.com, a linked-in of sorts for creatives. He also stressed how important it is not to die too soon, and the comfort that a thick hide provides when dealing with VCs. This was of course a perfect setup for the next act, which was Johan Brenner and Joel Eriksson from the top-ranked Swedish VC Creandum. They quoted Stenmark when asked whether their fortunate investments were due to skill or luck: "Ju mer jag tränar, desto mer tur har jag" (The more I exercise, the more luck I have).

The concluding act for the entire week was Rohit Sharma at True Ventures, a VC specializing in the riskiest of risky capital. Rohit, who is one of the masterminds behind the firm, prophesied the rapid demise of the lumbering enterprise-software platforms and a third coming of video applications. The overall impression was like being soaked in pure enlightenment. This feeling wore off a little on the long-haul flight home (with an entertainment system just one notch above a TI-84 calculator), but it leaves in its wake an almost pathological interest for lean customer development. Just six months to go and 100 interviews to conduct before examination day!

/Johanna