Sep 24, 2026 · 12 min · 8 segments
15 years ago, my Lean LaunchPad class changed how entrepreneurship is taught. The class is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide and helped launch thousands of startups. But this past…
For the last 15 years, the cadence of the Lean Launchpad class has been the same.
Each week, student teams got out of the building and talked to 10 to 15 stakeholders.
The following week, they presented, here's what we thought, here's what we did, here's what we learned, and here's what we're going to do next week.
Over the 10-week quarter, teams would talk to 100-plus stakeholders and use this feedback to validate, modify, or invalidate their hypotheses about their business and refine and iterate their minimum viable product in search for product-market fit.
The experience was meant to mirror the real-world journey of a startup founder, and regardless of the technical fad of the moment, social media, mobile apps, energy, life science, defense, et al., this pedagogy has worked like clockwork for 15 years.
Coming into class in spring 2026, I had no idea that this year would be its last and how teaching entrepreneurship will never be the same.
Several months before the spring 2026 class was to start, we interviewed the teams to hear what problems they wanted to work on and select which would join the class.
In the first official class, it was always interesting to see how much they dug into the problem before the first day of class.
In the first class, teams typically presented a PowerPoint or wireframe of their product concept.
This year, however, when the first team presented, there were no PowerPoint or wireframe prototypes.
Instead, they demoed a complete product for pediatric sleep apnea, freight forwarding, 3D printing cooling for GPUs, music attribution.
This was the first time we had ever seen a team develop something this fast and feature-rich on day one.
As I was still processing what a great job this team had done, the next team got up and also demoed a finished product.
Two in a row? By the time the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth teams presented their complete products...
We kept looking at each other, trying to confirm, did you see what I saw? To be honest, at first, we instructors were giddy.
All the teams had used AI to build apps, digital twins, or clinical endpoints that in previous years we would have hoped to see at the end of week 10.
We left class thinking these teams were on a great trajectory and thought for sure this start would lead to amazing outcomes for all of them.
As a teaching team, we were so enamored with this phantom progress that we didn't stop the presses and refocus the students fast enough.
We didn't realize that AI had set our class on fire and would burn it to the ground.
For the last 15 years, the cadence of the Lean Launchpad class has been the same.
Each week, student teams got out of the building and talked to 10 to 15 stakeholders.
The following week, they presented, here's what we thought, here's what we did, here's what we learned, and here's what we're going to do next week.
Over the 10-week quarter, teams would talk to 100-plus stakeholders and use this feedback to validate, modify, or invalidate their hypotheses about their business and refine and iterate their minimum viable product in search for product-market fit.
The experience was meant to mirror the real-world journey of a startup founder, and regardless of the technical fad of the moment, social media, mobile apps, energy, life science, defense, et al., this pedagogy has worked like clockwork for 15 years.
Coming into class in spring 2026, I had no idea that this year would be its last and how teaching entrepreneurship will never be the same.
Several months before the spring 2026 class was to start, we interviewed the teams to hear what problems they wanted to work on and select which would join the class.
In the first official class, it was always interesting to see how much they dug into the problem before the first day of class.
In the first class, teams typically presented a PowerPoint or wireframe of their product concept.
This year, however, when the first team presented, there were no PowerPoint or wireframe prototypes.
Instead, they demoed a complete product for pediatric sleep apnea, freight forwarding, 3D printing cooling for GPUs, music attribution.
This was the first time we had ever seen a team develop something this fast and feature-rich on day one.
As I was still processing what a great job this team had done, the next team got up and also demoed a finished product.
Two in a row? By the time the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth teams presented their complete products...
We kept looking at each other, trying to confirm, did you see what I saw? To be honest, at first, we instructors were giddy.
All the teams had used AI to build apps, digital twins, or clinical endpoints that in previous years we would have hoped to see at the end of week 10.
We left class thinking these teams were on a great trajectory and thought for sure this start would lead to amazing outcomes for all of them.
As a teaching team, we were so enamored with this phantom progress that we didn't stop the presses and refocus the students fast enough.
We didn't realize that AI had set our class on fire and would burn it to the ground.
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