For once, I’m presenting you with someone else’s slides: a quick introduction to Lean Startup by Christophe Monnier. In fact, Christophe is my partner at SmartView. Lean Startup is a key, fascinating subject. And I’m quite pleased that Christophe has taken it on so much. I like to think that I had a little something to do with it. We talk a lot about agility between us, in the form of jokes, real debates, thumbing our noses, but in all cases we challenge each other, question ourselves. We particularly exchange… books (like the practice of Culture Game by Dan Mezick), I believe, for a long time now, in this, it’s partly how I think I progress.

And then at SmartView we experiment: we tried to eliminate objective-based bonuses (read “Drive” by Dan Pink). Tried because not all colleagues necessarily wanted to. We also eliminated vacation (the protocol is currently being tested). What does that mean? That we no longer count vacation days, people take what they want as long as SmartView is doing well. We try retrospectives regularly (there we’re not regular enough), business model canvas for our offerings, etc.

Christophe is also affiliated with business angel groups, he helps these groups in the selection of start ups, so it’s not surprising that he completely hooked onto Lean Startup.