07-15-2025
When asked what I teach, I am often uncomfortable responding with “I teach entrepreneurship.” It feels like a contradiction in terms. Entrepreneurs learn by doing.
Pivots and iterations are part of the entrepreneurial lexicon and inevitable stages of the entrepreneurial journey. Steve Blank, the creator of the Lean Launchpad methodology, describes a startup as a “temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.” The early days of a startup are characterized by experimentation and testing, finding out what works and what doesn’t. Few companies resemble their initial conception or even follow a predictable roadmap. The fuzzy front-end of the entrepreneurship journey can result in an unexpected direction — logical in hindsight, but difficult to predict.
Most entrepreneurial ventures fail. So, should I teach students how not to fail? Entrepreneurs embrace and learn from failure. As Blank warns, “no business plan survives first contact with customers.” A serial entrepreneur who has experienced both successes and failures, Blank embraces failure as a learning opportunity, not a deterrent. Elsewhere, a Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co partner, reflecting on his investment in the failed govWorks.com — featured in the documentary Startup.com — rued his mistake of investing in a founder team that had not failed before. They didn’t know what they didn’t know or know what to expect.
Still, venture capitalists understand and live with failure. Despite rigorous due diligence, on average, almost two-thirds of venture capital investments fail to return their original investment. To draw from tennis, the great Roger Federer, who won 80% of his matches over the course of his legendary career, only won 54% of the points, losing almost as many as he won. In a commencement speech at Dartmouth College, Federer advised the graduating students, “When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot ... but when it’s behind you, it’s behind you ... this mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point.”
What can we do? All the skills that Daniels School students learn in their courses will be useful at some stage in the development of their entrepreneurial ventures, as well as in establishing new business units for established companies. We can — and do — teach these concepts in the context of startups and early-stage companies. What’s missing is the single biggest predictor of startup success — having a strong and direct value proposition for a well-defined customer segment. If you are building something no one wants or there is not a compelling reason for people to buy, spending marketing dollars, hiring the best salespeople, or building the coolest website will not overcome customer indifference.
So, the most important skill to complement traditional business education is how to talk with and learn from your customers, what is known as “customer discovery.” This involves getting out of the building and meeting with potential customers, not to sell your idea, but to understand the needs, problems and opportunities associated with whatever it is they are trying to get done in their work or in their lives. In the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corp (I-CorpsTM) program, founder teams conduct more than 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Student teams do the same over 14 weeks in my entrepreneurial biomedship course. The knowledge and insights gained from this depth of customer interaction lay a solid foundation for the next steps in their entrepreneurial journey — a fit between a proposed solution and the problem(s) customers will pay to have solved.
Failure is often an inevitable part of the customer discovery process, but can be experienced and managed at a much lower cost than after forming a company, raising money and hiring people. Invalidating critical assumptions and selecting an informed, even unexpected path forward before committing substantial time, money and other resources is the wisest form of failure.
Matthew Lynall is the Co-PI and Director for the NSF I-Corps Hub, Great Lakes Region, in collaboration with the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Minnesota. Lynall is a clinical professor of management in the Daniels School's Strategic Management Department. The focus of his academic efforts is working with faculty and graduate researchers to translate their research into practice through commercialization. He previously served as Purdue’s Avrum and Joyce Gray Director of the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship.
