STARTUP ELITE TRAINING (SUET)

INTRODUCTION

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE BIG VISION……………………………………………………..3

THE BIG CHALLENGE……………………………………………....4

THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP LANDSCAPE IN ROCHESTER….5

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR COLLABORATION…………………...7

WHAT IS STARTUP ELITE TRAINING (SUET)?..........................9

EMPATHIZING WITH THE PROBLEMS UOFR ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENTS WILL FACE…………………10

THE SUET CURRICULUM………………………………………....11

WHAT IS THE LIGHT LEADERSHIP MASTERMIND APP?.......14

OTHER USEFUL RESEARCH……………………………………..15

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THE BIG VISION:

● Corporate bureaucracies are slow to innovate, have misaligned incentives and are leading us toward financial and ecological crisis;

● More than 80% of the global workforce are disengaged at work;

● 90-95% of funded startups are expected to fail;

● Co-founder disputes are one of the top reasons for startup failure; and yet

● Rapid, collaborative innovation of the highest caliber is what is necessary for us to find the solutions for the biggest challenges humanity now faces.

Light Leadership has a vision of a more beautiful world that works for everyone. We believe creating that world will come from feeling connected to a small group of people, feeling like what we're doing is purposeful and meaningful and maintaining an environment of psychological safety. When these conditions are in place we can consistently invent and innovate. We believe that entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned in today's world. They are visionaries, creative innovators, risk takers and problem-solvers. They hold many of the pieces of the more beautiful world, but they need effective, adaptable and resilient teams to bring these visions into reality. At Light Leadership, we’re dedicated to supporting these creators to be continually creating.

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THE BIG CHALLENGE:

There's very little important work that people do individually in isolation nowadays; so, us human beings need to learn how to be in relationship with other people who can bring the skills to the table that we don’t have and who can offer the gift of diverse perspectives. That may sound easy enough, but Boomer and Gen X generations are accustomed to very different relationship dynamics than Millenials and Gen Z. The older generation were conditioned by bureaucratic environments, value more in-person connection and are accustomed to engaging in hierarchical power relationships. Whereas the younger generation are more connected digitally, value having more geographic freedom, are decidedly more non-hierarchical and are not very deeply connected or related with one another. Unfortunately, as soon as people are out of direct in-person relationship with each other and are texting or emailing back and forth, they lose many of the social cues that support them to feel deeply related. That’s why we believe that if schools and entrepreneurial programs could create an environment where millennials and Gen X-ers had the tools to connect with each other, restore the missing human cues, and learn how to deeply empathize with one another, they could flourish in a non-hierarchical dynamic and be more adaptable, resilient and consistently access higher levels of genuine creativity together.

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THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP LANDSCAPE IN ROCHESTER:

The iZone: Our understanding is that the iZone is a beautiful space at the University of Rochester (UofR) dedicated to supporting student Design Thinking, as the front end for early stage entrepreneurial ideation.

“Design Thinking encourages entrepreneurs to start by empathizing with customers, defining their most pressing issues and based on this input, coming up with a variety of relevant ideas. All of these steps are taken

before considering the development of a prototype”

(Board of Innovation Article)

This Design Thinking approach reduces the risks involved for both students and investors bringing new innovations to market, by probing peoples’ interest before actually investing in development. The early ideation in this Design Thinking phase requires a lot of direct involvement with the students, and is achieved through student mentors, with “actual time” to spend with students.

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The AIN Center Our understanding is that once an idea (perhaps produced in the iZone Design Thinking process) has progressed sufficiently, it then has the option to move into the Lean Startup phase at the AIN accelerator which:

“…..is best defined as a blueprint for how to run a startup. In essence, the goal is to find a product-market fit by moving a Minimum Viable Product

(MVP) through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.”

“The Lean Startup provides added value over Design Thinking by providing practitioners with a framework and actionable metrics (metrics that tie

specific and repeatable actions to observed results”

(Board of Innovation Article)

To our understanding, this is what triggers the appropriate support of the in-house subject matter experts (and iCorps and TEAM functions) that the AIN Center, sponsored at the UofR, provides to the students.

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THE OPPORTUNITY FOR COLLABORATION:

Clearly there is a natural complement between the iZone’s Design Thinking and the AIN Center’s Lean Startup approach. Given the generous support that has gone into these two institutions, there also appear to be various UofR alumni who strongly believe in supporting these institutions to cultivate a thriving culture of entrepreneurial innovation and success in the Rochester area. However, currently there appears to be no clear bridge for the students between a high-touch approach to in-person support offered by the iZone, to the primarily subject-matter support provided by the AIN center.

“As a general rule, you want to have a certain amount of validation about the problem you are solving, the solution you are providing, and the business model

you plan to use before commencing with Lean Startup.”

(Board of Innovation Article)

It’s a significant transition for entrepreneurship students, to move from a place where they are highly supported by external mentors, to a place where they are largely relying on the feedback from the members of their team. Especially when you consider that culturally, the younger generation are accustomed to being more connected digitally, are decidedly more non-hierarchical and are not well versed in the art of being deeply connected or related with one another. Ideally any actual or potential investors in these startup teams (or in the AIN Center itself) would want a certain amount of validation that the team is sufficiently connected, communicating

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clearly, resilient, adaptable and effective enough to handle the Lean Startup process to mitigate the risk of funding. As such, there would be value in there being a level of coherence between the respective visions, missions and approaches of the iZone and the AIN Center, and a clearly delineated pipeline between the two entities that could teach the students how to come into relationship with each other, such that they can not only stand in the face of the inevitable entrepreneurial challenges, but actually thrive while receiving the benefits of the guidance of these two institutions. So what could be introduced to support the students in building their relationships as they transition between the Design Thinking ideation phase in the iZone into the Lean Startup rapid creation phase at the AIN Center? This is where the Startup Elite Training (SUET) curriculum and the metrics provided by the Mastermind app, can offer support with continuity over time.

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WHAT IS STARTUP ELITE TRAINING (SUET)? The Startup Elite Training Curriculum is focused on supporting teams to form deep and resilient relationship bonds so they can function together as an effective and adaptable team. Given that the current success rate of startup ventures is languishing around the 5-10% mark, (a) it would seem that, at least currently, only the “elite” make the grade; and (b) there is clearly plenty of room for improvement. As such, these UofR entrepreneurship hubs have an opportunity to lead the way. According to research published last year, collated from list of 101 startup failure post-mortems, 1

co-founder conflicts and investor relationship breakdowns are one of the top reasons for startup failure. Evidently the cultivation of healthy and resilient relationships among students who are creating something together, and the investors who are looking at funding them, in a way that is also visible and measurable is extremely important. Interestingly, Design Thinking starts from the premise that:

“…….you should always start by building empathy with the people you are building a product/service for.”

(Board of Innovation Article)

So clearly empathy is recognised as valuable for understanding the customer in the Design Thinking approach, but what about the importance of the students also building empathy with the people they are building a product or service with? Ultimately the health of the relationships within the group (and the ancillary people they are connected to) are the very foundation of any creative business endeavour, so what’s happening within the group’s relationship dynamics, will directly affect how effectively the group is showing up and how effective they are at producing and adapting in the outside world.

1 These are statistics from a CBInsights report from Feb 2018 citing some key relationally-related reasons for startup team failures

● No market need - 42% (a.k.a failure of the team to adapt and pivot effectively) ● Not the right team - 23% ● Disharmony among team/investors - 13% ● Pivot-related failure - 17% (again, this amounts to failure of the team to adapt and pivot

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EMPATHIZING WITH THE PROBLEMS UOFR ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENTS WILL FACE

“I particularly like the emphasis on empathy with customers in the Design Thinking approach, as human emotions are completely absent from Lean Startups, and that's crippling for any startup, much less for a student startup where the opportunity to

explore the emotional space is both more easily done (students are more open) and also more critical.”

(Andrew Scheinman - Volunteer Mentor at the AIN Center)

In Design Thinking, the focus is on the “Problem space” - in the empathetic discovery of user needs, contexts, problems and the openness to a wide variety of ideas. As we’ve seen, one of the biggest problems startups face is relational breakdowns. The research shows that the relational tensions within a highly interacting small group creating something together often create entropic group dynamics that are a major cause of project failure. Relational tensions can cause: trust to erode, stagnant creative energy, apathy/people becoming checked out, stress, bottled up emotions, isolation, health issues/burn out, impact on personal relationships and so much more. Relational tensions occur when, for example: ● Team members are having a hard time giving feedback to the people in their group without

someone having a hissy fit, getting triggered or perceiving them as “the bad guy”;

● Team members feel like they’re treading on eggshells around other group members because none of the uncomfortable personal or interpersonal stuff is being spoken to (and that’s massively impacting the group’s ability to be consistently responsive or creative);

● A team member feels like they’re in a consistent untenable power struggle with one or more people in their group, that doesn’t get spoken to or moved through;

● Someone in the group is constantly pulling people aside to share an issue they have with someone else in the group, but they’re never bringing it directly to the person;

● One or more people in the group are continually frustrated by someone consistently underperforming and are wanting an opportunity to address it collectively, without all of the onus being on them; or

● Members of the group aren’t speaking to the issues they’re experiencing because they’re attached to the money they’re earning and afraid at the of risking losing it.

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THE SUET CURRICULUM The SUET curriculum is focused on supporting teams to form deep and resilient relationship bonds so they can function together as an effective and adaptable team. It does this by taking an approach to startup elite training, that puts the human beings and their relationships with each other first. In the process of traversing the potentially challenging emotional and relational terrain that represents the team’s biggest risk, by revealing, addressing and releasing the invisible tensions that lie under the surface in their dynamics, the team are able to access more resilience (both individually and as a group), a greater range of expression and more creative energy. Over time, the group will experience, and with the support of the app tracking the metrics, also visibly see themselves come into greater levels of group social coherence. This increased coherence then allows the team to be more adaptable and thus able to pivot to find product market fit more easily and more effectively. Through teaching and training methods that have an ability to leverage both the body and mind to ‘embody’ change at a tangible and practical level, the curriculum will impact fitness, wellness, relationships, habits and overall experiential understanding of what it takes to become a resilient, effective and adaptable team. Below is an outline of the various modules included in the curriculum:

TO EO TP DESCRIPTION

1 Form Your Tribe

1.1 Connection

1.1.1 Introduction

1.1.2 Story Telling

1.1.3 Why Be An Entrepreneur

1.1.4 Vision And Devotion

1.1.5 Actualising A Vision

1.1.6 Latticing

1.1.7 Strong Vision Sharing

1.2 Trust Building

1.2.1 Internalised Entrepreneurship

1.2.2 Transparency

1.2.3 Vulnerability

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1.2.4 Trust

1.2.5 Non-Judgment

1.2.6 Responsibility

1.2.7 Empathy

1.2.8 Character Traits

1.3 Resilience

1.3.1 Emergencies

1.3.2 Triggers

1.3.3 Typical Impacts

1.3.4 Handling Intensity

1.3.5 FeedBack And Surrender

1.3.6 Fight, Flight and Freeze

2 Function As A Tribe

2.1 Clarity

2.1.1 Foreign Language

2.1.2 Culture

2.1.3 Geography

2.1.4 EQ

2.1.5 SME’s

2.1.6 Lost Cues

2.1.7 Attention to Detail

2.1.8 Gender

2.2 Communication

2.2.1 Terminology

2.2.2 Tailoring Communication

2.2.3 Confirmation Of Intent

2.2.4 Full Expression

2.2.5 Emotions

2.3 Adaptability

2.3.1 Fail Fast, Fail Forward

2.3.2 Flexible Expectations (Flex-pectations)

2.4 Coherence

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2.4.1 Introducing the Mastermind App

2.4.2 Giving and Receiving Feedback

2.4.3 Ambiguity

2.4.4 Intuition

2.4.5 Avoidance

2.4.6 Interpreting the Mastermind Tension Rating Shapes

2.5 Sweat Lodge

2.5.1 Introduction

2.5.2 Emotions

2.5.3 Full Expression

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WHAT IS THE LIGHT LEADERSHIP MASTERMIND APP?

“Power may be produced through friendly alliance of minds.”

When we first came together, as a group of good friends in pursuit of our “definite purpose” (what we call our “Shared Vision”), we were well aware of the kinds of challenges we would face in today’s rapidly changing business environment given the oft reported 90-95% failure of startup endeavors. We knew we would need to learn how to become an adaptable and resilient team, effectively track and respond to the market and each other, and learn to pivot rapidly and often together. And yet, despite our awareness of the challenges and our best efforts to navigate them consciously, we still found ourselves facing many of the myriad issues and slipping into many of the same grooves that are outlined above (pedestalling, martyrdom, silo-ing and a variety of resentments and judgments to name a few). Our original founder was really smart but had no prior experience running a business, knew he needed the diverse perspectives of the other members of the group for the business to perpetually thrive and didn’t want to be stuck at the top of a hierarchy of his friends, giving all of the difficult and uncomfortable feedback. So in an effort to establish and maintain more equal relationships among the members of the group, we decided to create a system that would make the process of giving and receiving feedback smoother, more commonplace and more natural; one that could surface the invisible tensions that so often break groups apart, to ensure that they could be navigated together and bring us back into “function(ing) in harmony”. That’s why we created an app that supports a culture of distributed feedback, provides a pressure release mechanism for any tensions that are building up within the group, empowers each member of the group to address tensions directly with each other, and allows us a group to track and make visible progress around relational coherence and group “harmony”. HOMESCREEN CREATE SPHERE SETTINGS TENSION RATING

Click Here to view the Mastermind App Supporting Booklet

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USEFUL RESEARCH: https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/lean-startup-versus-design-thinking/ “It is essential for companies to ask themselves the question when to apply either Design Thinking or Lean Startup.” Lean Startup: “…..is best defined as a blueprint for how to run a startup. In essence, the goal is to find a product-market fit by moving a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.” Teams start by building a minimum set of features that satisfy early users (MVP). They then test the assumptions they made about key features early-on with users and measure the data they acquire from experiments. Evidence-based decisions can then be made about the direction the product/service should be moving into for the next iteration. The goal being to reach a state where the data proves the team has built a product/service that accurately addresses the needs/demands of the market. Design Thinking: “…….you should always start by building empathy with the people you are building a product/service for.” A plethora of techniques are used to gain insights into human behavior, to enable the team to come to a clear understanding of who the user is and what his/her needs are. After empathizing with the user, Design Thinkers define and prioritize users’ most pressing problems and consequently come up with relevant ideas to solve them. Ideas are then translated into rudimentary prototypes and presented to users. A prototype contains a minimum set of features (like the MVP in Lean Startup) that are tested in a continuous feedback loop (like the Build-measure-learn loop in Lean Startup). The core benefit of Design Thinking lies in the discovery of user needs, contexts, problems and the openness to a wide variety of ideas.

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Although the majority of their value is manifested in different stages of the innovation pipeline, Lean Startup and Design Thinking are inherently intertwined. There is a division between ‘problem space’ & ‘solution space’ which offers us an alternative way of thinking about the two approaches, as two parts of a larger innovation strategy. The Problem space is where the users and their needs live and Design Thinking primarily adds value in the problem space. The Solution space is where products, services, and experiences that fulfill users’ needs live. Lean Startup lives entirely in the Solution space. As a general rule, you want to have a certain amount of validation about the problem you are solving, the solution you are providing, and the business model you plan to use before commencing with Lean Startup. The launching point for Lean Startup should be heavily de-risked through the validation that was carried out during the Design Thinking phase. Design thinking and Lean Startup are two parts of a holistic innovation process. They are highly complementary and provide how-to approaches for on-the-ground, day-to-day innovation management. Keep the problem space/solution space framework in mind. This helps to determine the state of your innovation project and to determine which methodology is most suitable. Avoid jumping into a Lean Startup approach to quickly. Move into a Lean Startup approach when you have gathered sufficient validation about the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you are proposing.

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Research on Causes of Failure of Startups: 1. Article on Torch - Why Most Startups Fail Because of People Problems - Jan 2019 https://torch.io/why-most-startups-fail-because-of-people-problems/ Cameron is the Co-founder and CEO of Torch Leadership Labs. As an executive coach, Cameron worked with CEO’s from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies and was also a part time employee at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He says: “75% of startups that fail is the people hired for the job. In fact, CBInsights listed “not the right team” as their third most common reason for failure after studying the post-mortems of more than 100 failed startups. This could be someone with the wrong skill set for their position, conflict between decision makers, lack of HR resources to build a cohesive team, or any number of challenges that can make a team less efficient and less effective………..Sure, there may be conflicts or poor skill fits, but just as often, founders are focused on engineering and sales above and beyond their team. They neglect to focus on organizational design and how it can impact the individuals who actually have to do the work. Some of the most common issues here include, young co-founders flush with cash are often tempted to bring in friends and family to fill those early roles. Whether these people are qualified or not, concerns over nepotism, how to discuss performance problems, and the inevitable stress of having to fire those who they have personal relationships with can create unnecessary tension in the company.” [NOTE: He has written another article called: The Secret to Managing a Successful Co-Founder Relationship which is also relevant to the topic. https://torch.io/the-secret-to-managing-a-successful-co-founder-relationship/] 2. Startup Failure Infographic: https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate?fbclid=IwAR04PrAJlTBqGKl9oQ04AFPkN53nYkZ6GCX1TPdQ14fMR5X6WVeNXa-DlFQ

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3. Article in TechCrunch Magazine: Co-Founder Conflict https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/18/co-founder-conflict/amp/ Garry Tan is managing partner at Initialized Capital, a seed-stage VC firm. He was previously a partner at Y Combinator. Before that he was co-founder of Posterous (acquired by Twitter).

He says: "Co-founder disputes have historically been one of the top reasons startups fail at the earliest possible stage. Most that do fail do so because conflict (either too much or too little) is left unresolved for too long; with these tools, you’ll at least be a little more prepared against that possibility. Embrace the conflict — just the right amount — and you’ll get through this, too.” 4. The Co-Founder Mythology - Video = 3mins 44secs, extract 58secs in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0PFxUGgAJ4&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2_yoVxKhIQozgCaBYEZNo6d4GAKWnM6bjv_pGw_m68v9BhOtoYtT7l03g Mark Suster is a VC and Serial Entrepreneur. He says: “Most companies fail and he spends most of his time as a marriage counsellor with start ups who don't get along due to life event, someone wants to throw themself at the company,

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someone doesn't, someone gets married or gets a girlfriend, who is going to be CEO - these are garden variety issue that happen all the time. Need CEO to give people decision-making and divorce clauses.”

5. Founders Dilemmas: Relationships - Video = 5mins 19sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIWpveNLNLc

Prof Noam Wasserman is a Professor at Harvard Business School He says: “Most people are co-founding with friends and family - so it's worth thinking about why we head down the path of going in with friends and our most cherished relationships. They are the least stable business - we assume we know them, we assume we'll trust them and that we're on the same page. Whereas with acquaintances, they KNOW they don't know each other, so they make the effort to get to know each other. We're also making assumptions about how skilled our friends are and how capable they are of scaling. The types of challenges they face are the low likelihood of needing to discuss the difficult conversations, and the concurrent likelihood of things blowing up if you do.”

6. The Secret to Successful Co-Founder Relationships: Webinar Presentation with Justin Kan https://info.torch.io/webinar-replay-successful-co-founder-relationship?hsCtaTracking=91e73a08-5e7b-468d-8771-8493ff178daa%7C311695f4-8cd4-4bfb-a31e-cdc847b72f6a Justin Kan is the CEO of Atrium, a tech enabled law firm for startups backed by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst (recently raised $65M in funding). Before Atrium, he was the co-founder of Twitch, a video game streaming platform (acquired by for $970mm by Amazon in 2014) and was a Partner at Y Combinator from 2011-2017. During his time there, he impacted over 900 companies and funded more than 130.

7. Founders Dilemmas: Challenges on the Road to Growth - Video - 7mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjITTWPt11U&t=1s Prof Noam Wasserman is a Professor at Harvard Business School He says: 4 years in, 50% of founders have been replaced as the CEO. 3/4 of them have been fired by the Board. It's a tough transition to no longer be the fearless leader at the top.

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