The Brilliance of Bob Dorf

Lessons learned on innovation, startups, and a life well-lived

This week, the world lost an amazing business thinker, author, and teacher. And I lost a dear friend.

Bob Dorf was a serial entrepreneur who quit his first “real job” a year out of college to start his own business. He spent his last twenty years mentoring and coaching startup entrepreneurs around the world.

Bob deeply influenced my own work, thinking, and writing. He helped me gain a sense of the bloody, messy truth of innovation—of what it means to actually do “rapid experimentation” in pursuit of a new venture, whether in a startup or a large, established company.

Bob Dorf teaching at Columbia Business School

Bob and the Lean Startup

Bob is known to many as one of the leading evangelists for a theory and methodology of business innovation known as “Lean Startup.”

Lean Startup is one of the most influential bodies of thinking on innovation to arise in the digital era. Its ideas originated with Steve Blank, who argued for a fundamentally different approach to growing new ventures than the prevailing orthodoxy of business planning and product development.

After Steve’s first book, he asked Bob to collaborate with him in writing “The Startup Owner’s Manual”, a hugely influential global bestseller.

Among the key tenets of Lean Startup:

• Real innovation happens only by learning directly from customers (“Get out of the building!”)

• Learning happens through in-person interviews, and with MVPs designed to capture customer feedback

• Building any new venture should be a highly iterative process that seeks to spend less upfront, build something tangible as early as possible, and use that to validate assumptions and reduce uncertainty in rapid fashion.

Wisdom from Bob

I had the great privilege and great fun to teach with Bob in my digital business leadership programs at Columbia Business School.

We spent many hours together, coaching teams of executives from around the world, as they scrambled to find business models for actual digital products and services that would solve real problems for real customers.

Bob would never sugarcoat – “Your positioning statement is a mess.” “It sounds like the customer does not want your current product!”

Yet he was always encouraging – “I know you guys can do this… what’s next?”

He was beloved by every team I saw him coach. And he brightened us all with his tales of startup wisdom.

Among my favorite aphorisms of Bob’s –

“Most new businesses die from lack of customers.” This, as I learned, is why every innovation journey must begin with validating whether you are solving a real problem experienced by actual, flesh and blood customers. Most startups and new innovations fail this test.

“If it’s not a top five problem, you’ve got no business.” Solving a problem is not enough. It has to be a problem that truly matters to at least some customers. It’s not enough for the customer to recognize the problem you are working on. Unless they feel a burning urgency to fix it, you will never build a profitable, scalable business.

“Your early MVPs should be cast in Jell-O.” Don’t sink a lot of time and energy building the first version of your product. Create something simple, so your strategy is still malleable when you put your MVP in the hands of the customer and get your first real feedback.

“Validation only stops when you sell your business for millions, or the furniture for pennies.” For any innovation, the process of validation (testing and learning from the market) never ends. Every step forward in growing your venture will mean new things to learn, new business questions to answer. And those questions can only be answered by experimentation and learning.

“Business plan writing is a wonderful genre of fiction. It should be taught in the creative writing department of this university.” The base line truth of innovation is that you do not know what will work before you start. Faced with that terrifying uncertainty, the worst thing you can do is write up a detailed plan for the future and wish it to be true. Instead, start with a list of questions or hypotheses. Then focus on learning fast.

BONUS READING:

I loved this interview with Bob by At Startup Speed. It’s full of Bob’s inimitable insights and wit. https://bit.ly/Bob-Dorf-at-Startup-Speed

BONUS VIDEOS:

Four minutes of Bob speaking in the classroom, on learning from customers and the Lean Startup. https://bit.ly/Bob-Dorf-4min-Lean-Startup

Bob and I onstage with graduates of the Digital Business Leadership Program

Farewell, Good Friend

I received an outpouring of well wishes and testimonials this week upon sharing news of Bob’s death.

Bob left us after a courageous eighteen-month battle with cancer, during which he never lost his charm, warmth, and unending humor. He was surrounded by loving family to the end.

In the words of his daughter, Rachel:

We have been overwhelmed and touched by the outpouring of love from so many of you who have shared your memories and love for my dad…

In his 74 years, he touched more lives than I can fathom. His gregarious, magnanimous, and giving nature made everyone he met fall instantly in love…

He spent his life nurturing relationships, and was a walking, talking, press release on how connections with others are the most important thing in life.

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We should all hope to touch half as many lives as he has.

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