Why Teaching Entrepreneurship

Will Change Everything

Christina Wodtke

A Note on these slides

• This talk was given at Interactions 15 at the Education Summit.

• I have annotated these slides for reading but they were originally just images.

In my opinion, there are two conversations that are a waste

of time. One is "should designers learn to code". The

other is, "should designers learn the language of business."

The first is easy to answer. Architects learn to pour concrete.

Painters learn to stretch canvas. You just have to know your

medium to design well for it.

Getting a understanding of code and databases will make you better at interaction design.

It’s your medium. Learn it, and then you do not need to do it

again, until your medium shifts.

Which it will.

The second question is harder, because it's a poorly framed question. Design rarely asks if it needs to understand business; there is an implicit feeling

they know enough already.

But business is as much a medium we work in as code. This is not a linguistic issue. It’s not a

culture issue. It’s a knowledge issue.

So, if we ask this new question, “should designers learn business”, I'd say yes!

What do we mean by business?

When I was at Yahoo, back in 2001 (a cyberspace odyssey) I was promoted into management. I took it very seriously, and

subscribed to HBR, read Porter and Drucker and Mintzberg and tried to use

excel.

I'd find out later that didn't end well because I have dyscalculia. I had

always thought the numbers danced around mocking me because I was a

designer, but apparently it was neurological.

The thing was, all that studying of MBA-type syllabi did not help me understand why my partners in business made the choices they

made.

?

Not once in my career has used the term ROI, outside of a "talking the

language of design" talks I've attended.

Flash forward a few years. I'm leaving a struggling design

agency I helped found, pregnant with a child and a startup.

My cofounder is an engineer, and neither of us know enough of the

reality of running a startup, thought we think we can since

we've both run our own consultancies.

We struggle along for awhile, raising money and signing important people like Om Malik

to our platform.

And then a book comes out, Four

Steps to the Epiphany and I

read it and it blows my mind. It's a

good book, but also it was a book I was ready to read. For the first time I had skin in the game.

I have a history of emailing

people I find interesting, but

couldn't find Steve Blank's email, only a

phone number at Hass where

he taught.

I called it, expecting to reach a answering machine in his offer.

Instead I got his wife. She said, I think it's one of your students.

I explained who I was, and he invited me out to his ranch in Pescadero,

where he was staying with his wife. I made some ridiculous comment like

I'd be out there anyway Wednesday to meet a potential client and I'd love to

swing by and drove out there to talk to him.

We spoke for two hours. It was before Eric Reis was his student, before he became the godfather of the startup

surge. But it changed my life.

I realized I had no market for the product as it was. I was a

designer and I had been doing customer interviews all along. I had all the facts to tell me that

the people I was targeting couldn't and wouldn't buy my

product.

But I hadn’t connected that to my business health. Because I didn’t really understand how

business functioned. I'd have to pivot… a word we didn't use

yet… in order to make money. Or close down.

I shopped my company around, and me, my CTO (my previous cofounder had left to become a life coach, but that's another story) and our code base found a home at Linkedin.

Working for Jeff Weiner again!

We informed our customers we were going away, and we were absorbed into what would be one of the most successful IPO's of 2011. Linkedin

was my finishing school, a smart and nimble company that knew how to

marry mission and money.

When I was offered a job at Linkedin, I was asked a critical question: join

design or join product management.

I chose product. I turned my back on design. After struggling so hard and long to have my dream come true, design seemed frivolous and wrongheaded. They continued to seem so as I moved through my

next few companies.

There were always a few individuals I loved working with, but most

designers seemed to always be advocating choices that would break

the business model, destroy revenue or erode competitive advantage.

And once burned, twice shy. I liked working with engineers, I

loved working with analytics folks, but designers made me nervous

now. Their choices seemed whimsical and dangerous.

But after leaving my last job as a

General Manager, I found myself

slowly returning to my roots and my early love. I

met with Kristian Simsarian to talk about teaching at

CCA.

I knew what I'd teach. I'd teach entrepreneurship. The Designer Fund had started,

AirBnB was the poster boy for entrepreneurial designers, and 500 startups kicked off Warm Gun, declaring design as the

next silver bullet

I went to CCA excited to share my hard earned learning at the newly minted topic studio, Designer as

Founder.

Any teacher will tell you: to learn anything well, teach it. I taught them Steve Blank,

Joined by Eric Reis's Lean Startup and the newly released Business Model Canvas

from Alex Osterwalder.

If you don't know the holy trinity, let me give you the 10000 foot bird eye's view.

Steve Blank said you should talk to your

customers as you develop your offering. He said

there were no answers in the building, you must go out into the world if you want to make something

people want.

Eric Reis said you should build small things, test them, learn, then build the next thing until you

find successes.

It all sounds like Experiential Learning and UCD, doesn’t it?

From Ed Batista http://www.edbatista.com/2007/10/experiential.html

And that’s how I taught it; We spend 16 weeks in teams trying to make an business that can fly.

Alex Osterwalder said you should look at all aspects of the business and design them collectively to assure a successful ecosystem.

While all three hold a distinctly user-centered design approach, Osterwalder is the first to state it unambiguously, using design

tools and innovation games throughout his book and calling them that. It is a designed book, in every sense of the world, and it was written in collaboration with a group of beta readers.

All three, at their hearts, are user-centered designers. They just happen

to design business.

While it is true my designer students still balked at doing market sizing,

they were terrific at customer development and rapid iteration. That said, their relationship with

math changed when I gave them one key assignment: Map out their

personal burn rate. They had to, in order to determine how much

money to raise, and how much to charge for their product.

First the first time for many, they added up their rent and food and transportation. They went on salary.com to find out how much an engineer would cost them (and boy, were they mad about their major when

they found out.)

They had thought they knew what their business model was.

But the math told them otherwise. If they were making

an ap, they found out they'd have to sell to everyone on

earth to break even.

Job's 99 cent world didn't seem fair anymore. Advertising had

similar problems.

And like Barbie, they said, math is hard. But for them, it meant the math of survival is hard.

One thing I didn't expect is that design students made better entrepreneurs than most of the startups I advised.

Like most senior people in the Valley, I had a handful of startups I spent time with. Most struggled to get traction with their target market.

Once designers got over their prejudice against business and fear of spreadsheets they were fearsome entrepreneurs.

In fact, I took many of the techniques developed in that class as well as a summer version of it I taught in Copenhagen at CIID, and brought them to the Lean Startup Conference and to my Stanford class in the Leadership program.

High demand at Lean

It's not just being user centered that makes designers great. It's they way they work. It's the post-its, and the walls covered with research and photos, and the drawings and the paper prototypes. It's the way we play, and are wrong and try again.

It's how designers think not only with their minds but with their bodies and

with the world. Call it design thinking, distributed cognition, or just call it

plain design, but it matters.

When I teach business people to act like designers, they think like designers.  They put the end user

in the center of their thinking. They playfully experiment, and test their

hypothesis with real people. They develop empathy, and refine

their businesses. They make better things. Sometimes they make truly

good things. 

This matters because we all want a better

world, and right now

entrepreneurship is the way to accelerate progress.

If we leave it to the MBAs who should be

on Wall Street pushing around

pretend money, we abdicate an

opportunity to make real and lasting

change for the better in the world, in favor for those who want to turn change into

another profit game.

But if we choose to teach our students what a healthy

business ecosystem really can be, they will be make the next B-corp, or healthy sustainable

nonprofit or maybe even a business that actually respects

the people it profits form, rather productizes them.

We need business and design to come together.

At the end of the Designer as Founder class I asked my students to write 500 words of a lessons learned for the class.  This sums it up for me: 

"I think about design differently in the sense that our design work doesn't exist inside of a bubble. …we influence many aspects of a business with our work but they also have huge influence on what we design...

Whether we like it or not.”

Thanks to all who make their work available via creative commons on

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Thank you!

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