Collaborative Software Initiative Inc.

Puneet Agarwal of True Ventures (investor in Portland's Urban Airship and Puppet Labs) will come to talk to us about his perspective on Lean Startups.

He'll talk about:

• Whether or not True Ventures looks for Lean Startup Principles in prospective portfolio companies

• How True Ventures advises it's portfolio companies - how Lean Startup techniques fit

• The transition from "Lean to Fat" - getting from Lean Startup to Big Company

Agenda 6:00 - 6:30 - Meet and Greet 6:30 - 8:00 - Puneet Talk and Discussion

About Puneet

Puneet brings a strong mix of operating and Venture Capital experience to the True team.

Prior to joining True, Puneet was the VP of Product Management at Geodesic Information Systems, which specializes in mobile and Internet communication products selling to consumers, OEMs, carriers, and online properties. There he helped grow the company from $20M to over $80M in revenue in two years and learned valuable lessons about building a successful team in times of rapid growth. As part of his experience with Geodesic, Puneet lived and worked in India for seven months before settling back in their West Coast offices.

Prior to Geodesic, Puneet spent four years at BEA Systems in a number of roles. Puneet ran product marketing for BEA’s JRockit product, traveled the world evangelizing BEA’s platform to CIOs and developers, and also conceived, initiated, and ran product management and marketing for BEA’s RFID initiative.

Puneet began his career at an early stage integration software startup, Crossworlds Software, which was later sold to IBM. He then spent some time in the investment world in corporate finance and M&A in J.P. Morgan’s tech practice where he worked on several technology IPOs and acquisitions. Puneet also spent two years in Venture Capital at the Mayfield Fund helping to invest in early stage software deals. Puneet joined during the height of the bubble and endured during the downturn as well. It was during this latter period when he helped to lead Mayfield’s investment in Trigo, an early enterprise software company, which was later sold to IBM.

At True, Puneet focuses on infrastructure and software applications specifically around cloud computing, open source, SaaS, and mobile. He currently sits on the board of LoopFuse.

Neil Patel from KISSmetrics will be in person to talk to us about his insights on Lean Startups and more!

About Neil

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. Through his entrepreneurial career Neil has helped large corporations such as Amazon, AOL, GM, HP and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.

More Information http://www.neilpatel.com/ http://www.kissmetrics.com/

Agenda 6:00 - 6:30 Meet and Greet (Meeting starts at 6:30) 6:30 - 8:00 Neil will talk to us re: his experience with Lean Startup techniques in his startup ventures including KISSmetrics. 8:00 - ? For those that are up to it, a beverage/snack at Veritable Quandary

Overview Paul Singh is the founder of MailFinch, the company that helps you send direct mail. All you have to do is upload a PDF and they’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, contact management, campaign blasts, drip campaigns and more. He also runs a business consulting company called Results Junkies. His previous company, Philtro, was acquired by CityVoice in late 2009.

You’ll learn how Paul launched his business with nothing but a landing page and how he built it into a profitable, growing business by applying lean thinking and getting input from his users every step of the way.

Agenda 6:00 - 6:30 Meet and Greet (Meeting starts at 6:30) 6:30 - 7:30 Paul will talk to us re: his experienced with Lean Startup techniques at his company MailFinch https://www.mailfinch... 7:30 - 8:00 Open Discussion 8:00 - ? For those that are up to it, a beverage/snack at Veritable Quandary

See Website for meeting agenda.

Agenda: 6:00-6:30 Meet & Greet 6:30-7:00 Mike & Erik to discuss highlights from SFO Startup Lessons Learned conference: * Highlights & Impressions - Mike * Insights from side conversations - Erik * Resources Conference Website: http://www.sllconf.com Videos: http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/videos 7:00-7:30 Mike will give a Customer Discovery Lessons Learned follow up to last time 7:30-8:00 Open discussion * Anyone have a startup issue they want to discuss with the group? 8:00 Beverage at Veritable Quandary for those who are interested

We are going to discuss "Customer Discovery" from Steve Blank's Customer Development Methodology:

http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-development-methodology-presentation

We'll walk through a sample Customer Development Plan and Steve's Customer Discovery Worksheets from Steve's book, "Four Steps to the Epiphany":

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705

We'll talk about things like: * Problem Hypothesis, Product Hypothesis, Market Hypothesis, Customer Hypothesis, Competitive Hypothesis, Channel Hypothesis * Aligning Product Development and the Customer Development team's schedules * Customer Discovery Interviews Finding People: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/best-practices/customer-development-interviews-how-to-finding-people The Interview: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/communication/customer-development-interviews-how-to-what-you-should-be-learning * Problem Presentation, Product Presentation * Problem Validation * Product Validation * Business Model Validation * Reality Checks * Iterate or Exit * And more!

Agenda: 6:00-6:30 Meet & Greet 6:30-7:00 Mike Herrick to go through a sample Customer Development Plan Outline & the Steve Blank Customer Discovery Worksheets 7:00-8:00 Discuss Customer Discovery 8:00-? Beverage at Veritable Quandary for those who are interested

We'll discuss the philosophy of a Lean Startup from 10,000 feet or so. Items we will cover:

* Lean Thinking, Lean Software Development, Agile
* Steve Blank's Customer Development
* Capital Efficiency
* Built on Commodity/Scalable/Innovative Stack: Use of Open Source Software, Cloud Computing, etc.

We'll mention some specific techniques that are popular in Lean Startups. These might make good future meeting topics.

* Minimum Viable Product (was our meeting topic Feb 17)
* Split Test - A/B Testing Experimentation
* Continuous Deployment
* 5 Why's
* AAA Metrics

This is a start at the agenda, more specifics will appear as we figure out the speaker(s), etc.

6:00 - 6:30 Meet and Greet 6:30 - 7:00 Watch a Minimum Viable Product Video 7:00 - 7:30 Discuss Minimum Viable Product Experiences and Ideas 7:30 - ? Retire to Veritable Quandary for a beverage