Venture Adventure

Buried in this WaPo puff piece about Neel Kashkari is this gem:

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

WAPO: “Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” N. Kashkari – http://bit.ly/5AitzU

Adis Abababa musing on startup budgets brings up a good point – understanding the underlying assumptions behind the budget.

As a CEO, another critical issue is to ask if there has been a major change – to either our underlying assumptions or to the external environment. Many of these changes go hidden but still impact what and how we do things.

Steve Blank gives us a very succinct definition of Customer Development:

In a startup the role of Customer Development is to:

1. test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem
2. test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem

Now I get it.

Going through some of my saved-for-later reading blog links, I came across a gem discussing software languages and where do we go from here… Take a moment to read this