Steve Clean Lean Launch Pad 2026 @ Stanford – Classes Discovered Presentations

We simply completed the sixteenth annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford.

In these 16 years, the category has gone from a radical concept – that the Lean technique may present a extra productive framework for brand new startups – to one thing that everybody agrees is a solution to construct new startups.

The class had gotten so standard that in 2021 we began educating it in each the winter and spring classes.

During the 2026 spring quarter the eight groups spoke to 978 potential prospects, beneficiaries and regulators. Most college students spent 15-20 hours every week on the category, about double that of a traditional class.

This Class Launched a Revolution in Teaching Entreprenurship – AI Is Changing It
This class was designed to interrupt out of “methods to write a commerce plan” because the capstone of entrepreneurial schooling. A commerce plan assumed that each one startups wanted to do was to write down a plan, elevate cash after which execute the plan. We overturned that orthodoxy once we identified that whereas present organizations execute commerce fashions, startups search for them. And {that a} startup was a short lived group designed to seek for a repeatable and scaleable commerce mannequin. This class was designed to show startups methods to seek for a commerce mannequin. I’ll summarize a number of the learnings about using AI on the finish of this publish.

Several government-funded packages have adopted this class at scale. The first was in 2011 once we turned this syllabus into the curriculum for the National Science Foundation I-Corps. Errol Arkilic, the then head of commercialization on the National Science Foundation, adopted the category saying, “You’ve developed the scientific technique for startups, utilizing the Business Model Canvas because the laboratory pocket book.” Now in its second decade and in 100+ universities, I-Corps has change into an ordinary for science commercialization on the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy –  coaching 3,251 groups and launching 1,400+ startups thus far.

Team Office Hours

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If you’ll be able to’t see a demo of the Team Office Hours app click on here

Design of This Class
While the Lean LaunchPad college students are experiencing what seems to them to be a totally hands-on, experiential class, it’s a fastidiously designed phantasm. In reality, it’s extremely structured. The syllabus has been designed in order that we’re providing continuous implicit steerage, construction, and repetition. This is a essential distinction between our class and an open-ended experiential class.

Guidance, Direction and Structure – For instance, college students begin the category with their very own preliminary steerage – they consider they’ve an concept for a services or products (Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps) or have been given a transparent real-world downside (Hacking for Defense). Coming into the category, college students consider their objective is to validate their commercialization or deployment hypotheses. (The educating group is aware of that over the course of the category, college students will uncover that almost all of their preliminary hypotheses are incorrect.)

Team Izhaar

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Team Trained on Me

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The Business Model Canvas
The business model / mission model canvas affords college students steerage, specific course, and construction. First, the canvas affords a whole, visible roadmap of all of the hypotheses they might want to take a look at over your entire class. Second, the canvas helps the scholars goal-seek by visualizing what an optimum endpoint would seem like – discovering product/market match. Finally, the canvas offers college students with a map of what they study week-to-week via their buyer discovery work. I can’t overemphasize the essential function of the canvas. Unlike an incubator or accelerator with no body, the canvas acts because the connective tissue – the body – that college students can fall again on in the event that they get misplaced or confused. It permits us to show the idea of methods to flip an concept, want, or downside into business apply, week by week a bit at a time.

Team Artemis

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Lean LaunchPad Tools
The instruments for buyer discovery (movies, pattern experiments, and so on.) supply steerage and construction for college kids to work exterior the classroom. The specific objective of 10-15 buyer interviews every week together with the requirement for constructing a continuing collection of minimal viable merchandise offers metrics that monitor the group’s progress. The necessary workplace hours with the instructors and assist from mentors present extra steerage and construction.

Team Remainder

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Team Microprint

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Team Vital Health

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Team Nimbus

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AI In the Classroom

AI Embedded within the Class
This was the primary 12 months the place all groups used AI to assist create their commerce mannequin canvas, construct working MVPs in hours, generate buyer questions, analyze and summarizing interviews.

AI has had some apparent and never so apparent impacts on our class.
First, right here’s a abstract of how our college students used AI in each courses I taught this quarter.

If you’ll be able to’t see the AI Use In Class slide click on here

AI Tools Used
Claude + Granola – had been the AI instruments utilized by everybody.
Large Language Models Used
– Claude, Claude Code, Claude Chrome extension, Claude Cowork, Claude Design
– ChatGPT
– Gemini
Note taking
– Granola
– Twinmind
Presentations
– Perplexity
Building prototypes
– Replit
– Lovable
Creating Synthetic Users
– Listen Labs
– Viewpoints AI
Summarizing Research
– Google NotebookLM
– Notion + G Suite (not strictly AI, however used as a part of AI workflows)
Other
– Ultralytics YOLOv8 (utilized by the SwarmShield H4D group for drone detection/monitoring MVP)

AI Classroom Usage
Three of our college students did a tutorial of how they used AI within the classroom.

If you’ll be able to’t see the AI Classroom Usage tutorial click on here

Impact of AI within the Classroom
The apparent and constructive modifications of AI had been that groups had been in a position to do buyer discovery extra effectively. The not so apparent change was that creating merchandise quickly allowed groups to make dangerous concepts go quicker. In the previous, MVPs had been an indication of a groups technical competence, however now spinning up one thing in hours that beforehand took weeks, signifies that an MVP is not proof of essential pondering and speculation testing.

This meant pupil studying was unbalanced. A finished-looking product felt like success. Students confused a sophisticated deliverable with the necessity to deeply perceive the wants of all of the stakeholders, in addition to the necessity for Customer Validation. Team understanding was much less nuanced. There was much less depth uniformly throughout the groups about the issue they had been fixing and understanding buyer wants. In this class it wasn’t the AI that was hallucinating –  it was groups. They pivoted late as they assumed {that a} polished product meant product/market match.

Going ahead we’ll have college students come into class with a prototype however subsequent time accompanied by the specific hypotheses and experiments they’ll use to validate whether or not the prototype solved an precise downside.

On the opposite hand, college students constructed some superb Claude Skills and Gemini Gems. They had been tons of untapped alternatives to construct digital twins or take a look at 10’s or 100’s of apps concurrently.

More about this in a separate weblog publish.

It Takes A Village
While I authored this weblog publish, this class is a group undertaking. The secret sauce of the success of Lean LaunchPad at Stanford is the extraordinary group of devoted volunteers supporting our college students in so many essential methods.

The educating group consisted of myself and:

• Steve Weinstein, companion at America’s Frontier Fund, 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley expertise firms and Hollywood media firms. Steve was CEO of MovieLabs, the joint R&D lab of the foremost movement image studios.
• Lee Redden – CTO and co-founder of Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere) who was a pupil within the first Lean LaunchPad class 14 years in the past! I wrote a publish about Lee’s journey here.
• Jennifer Carolan, Co-Founder, Partner at Reach Capital the main schooling VC and creator of the Hacking for Education class.

Our educating assistants this 12 months had been: Roya Meykadeh, Aditi Mahajan, Alina Hu.

The groups had been assisted by mentors: David Kopp, Mitch Singer, Pradeep Jotwani, Dave Epstein, Anil Kamath, Bobby Mukherjee, Rekha Pai, Venkat Krisnamurthy and mentor group coordinator Todd Basche.