Venture Hacks

“Startup Lessons Learned Conference #sllconf is going to be the Woodstock for entrepreneurs. If you weren’t there you will say you were.”

– Steve Blank

Startup Lessons Learned, the best startup conference of the year, is this Friday:

I think this is going to be the most actionable startup conference ever and the lead organizer, Eric Ries, has given us a whopping 25% discount for Venture Hacks readers who use the discount code VENTUREHACKS. (If you’re not in the Bay Area, check out the simulcasts.)

The list of speakers and mentors at the conference is off the hook. And we’ve interviewed Eric Ries many many times:

What is the minimum viable product?
How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year
Opening board meetings to the entire company

My lean journey

I first learned about lean software development when my brother Farb closed a Series A for Grockit with Benchmark. He was looking for developers and I told him to check out my del.icio.us bookmarks for developers and designers. He went through my bookmarks and hired Pivotal Labs, a team of contract developers that follows a rigorous Extreme Programming process (Farb has hired his own team since then.)

Fast forward a couple years and Farb turned me on to Pivotal for a project I was working on. I hired them and got hooked on Extreme Programming. I started learning more about lean and eventually wrote a half-wrong post called Lean startups find their moment. Fortunately, Eric Ries was already blogging about lean startups, saw my post, and corrected my errors in Lean startups vs. lean companies.

Now, Eric has roped Farb in to speak at the conference:

(The video also seems to imply that Farb is auditioning for the cast of CSI.)

Learn more about the Startup Lessons Learned Conference and don’t forget to use discount code VENTUREHACKS.