Max Marmer

I haven’t been writing much lately. Building my public voice hasn’t been a priority. But I thought I’d share this email I wrote, (lightly edited). The ideas in this post strongly reference the lean startup theory. If you don’t know much about that, this post might be a bit confusing.

…This also inspired me to write about lean startups applied to learning and education more broadly. I think right now the way classes are taught and the way education is structured is analogous to the old linear product development model. Where classes and skills are analogous to features and customer development is analogous to passion and purpose.

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Most learning is incredibly fat (unlean) because people make no assumptions about what they actually want to do. So all the classes they never use are akin to wasted code. The goal of education should not be broad exposure or diversity of skills, it should be passionately doing something, whether it’s making art or solving a problem.

Everything else will follow from there. As John Seely Brown said, “very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

That’s also reminds me why I had a slightly negative gut reaction to teaching customer development classes to people who haven’t done a startup or aren’t working on a startup. It’s analogous to when you said to me, “people shouldn’t hire consultants until they’ve fucked it up themselves. Otherwise they can’t even process a Sean Ellis or Sean Murphy”. Same thing with students. They need to create a first draft for a startup startup and mess it up before they learn customer development. I guess you overcome some of this problem with simulations, so they experience the problem viscerally. But that says that customer development is an end not a means. I think people need to apply customer development to solving a problem that they are really passionate about, and thinking about regularly; that resonates deeper than a simulation.

I interacted a lot with students from a few student entrepreneurship clubs this last year and I was frustrated with how many people wanted to consume inordinate amounts of knowledge about entrepreneurship before even hypothesizing about the company they wanted to start, much less just starting. It’s easy to fall into the skill accumulation as progress trap. Skill accumulation doesn’t even work very well because the Human Forgetting Curve is so steep.

Before learning customer development people should focus on vision — just exploring their own interests, and finding problems they want to solve.

Education is usually like the linear product development model startups use, in that students follow the process and get to the end ( a degree) yet most fail to find something they are passionate about. And failing to find their passion they get a regular job to pay the bills and that cycle is really hard to break out of.

In approaching my education, I have an hypothesis about what I want to do: This business Founders First. And I’m going to learn way more doing this then I could from scattered classes. Then I’m looking to learn what I need to make this happen. And along the way I get to meet great people, make an impact and integrate ideas from many disciplines.

Then after this project I get to go broad again: refocusing on things like the humanities. It doesn’t make sense to explore unrelated interests in left field when I’ve found something I’m passionate about. It’s like building all sorts of cool but extraneous features even after I’ve found product market fit. Once Product Market fit – I.e. Passion for a project, is found double down all your energy there.

Free form inspiration mode is waiting when you’re looking for the next thing to do.

I’ve written a few blog posts before about how to improve education and career development paths