Todd Park Quotes

I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

It turns out that in the federal government, there are a lot of innovators.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build-the thing customers want and will pay for-as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question: How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?

Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.

If there's one thing government needs desperately, it's the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolving from there, not the other way around.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.

Innovation - the heart of technological change - is fundamentally a learning process.

One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas. We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.

There's a lot of buzz words in the business world these days - Design thinking, innovation, fast-failure, disruption, cross-functional leadership - and at the heart of every one of these concepts is the ability for people to make small moves forward, learn, iterate.