Foreword

For over two decades, I worked in startups creating new products. When I retired and had to reflect on how new ventures were built, I realized that there was a more efficient way to use startup money, resources, and time. I developed a process called Customer Development and helped found a movement that embodied its core practices—The Lean Startup. This approach to innovation, along with business model design and agile development, are today transforming business as we have known it.

With this book, Lean Startups for Social Change, Michel Gelobter brings this powerful toolkit to the social sector.

The social sector has to keep up with, and in some cases outpace, changes in private markets to protect the noncommercial values and assets that form the bedrock of all we care about.

This book covers the core practices of the Lean Startup—how experimentation should supplant detailed planning, the critical practice of listening to customers (or “targets” in social-sector speak), and agility—while showing how nonprofit and government organizations can embrace these processes.

Innovation is vital to both the social sector and business, but the two do not operate, and therefore do not innovate, in the same way. Michel provides in-depth stories, examples, and tools to bridge these methods of innovation, relying on his years of experience in each of the relevant sectors—business, government, and nonprofit—to do so.

Michel and I met through our shared interest in the environment. He moved from social entrepreneurship to software entrepreneurship in the mid-2000s and contacted me to help with his first company. I went in the other direction. After I retired I started serving on nonprofit boards as chairman of Audubon California and then as a public official on the California Coastal Commission.

While I’ve helped accelerate innovation over the last three decades, I share with Michel a desire to repair the world we live in and to pass on to future generations a place with the same opportunities and beauty.

We must all learn to innovate, to change, to preserve what we most care about. With this book, Michel has made an invaluable contribution to that task.

Steve Blank

Pescadero, California