lean-startup
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Nextstars built a factory for founders without an idea
In Paris, Nextstars paired small seed cheques with a more unusual offer: a business idea in search of its entrepreneur. Its two-door model made customer testing the bridge between an interesting concept and an investable company.
Catalysr turns new arrivals into startup founders
A failed startup helped Usman Iftikhar find a better problem to solve: getting migrant talent into business. Catalysr now pairs entrepreneurship lessons with the local connections a passport cannot supply.
Fábrica de Startups puts your big idea on trial
The Portuguese accelerator has built a business around an awkward question: does anybody actually want this? Its latest program adds AI to the investigation, while keeping real customers in the witness box.
Startup Incubator Berlin Makes Room for the Wrong First Idea
At HWR Berlin’s founding center, free coaching, public scholarships and evenings of user testing give early ideas a practical education. The point is to learn what customers need before the money runs out.
Hubert Palan
Hubert Palan is the Czech-born founder and CEO of Productboard, the AI-powered product management platform used by 5,400+ companies including Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and spending nearly four years as VP of Product at GoodData, he founded Productboard in 2014 with co-founder Daniel Hejl to solve a problem he'd lived firsthand: the disconnect between customer feedback, product strategy, and what actually gets built. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 with a $1.725B valuation following a $125M Series D, and Palan has since led a bold AI-first transformation of the platform with products like Productboard Spark and Productboard Pulse.
Dan Olsen
Dan Olsen is a Silicon Valley-based product management consultant, author, and speaker best known for writing The Lean Product Playbook (Wiley, 2015) - a practical, framework-driven guide to achieving product-market fit. His Product-Market Fit Pyramid and six-step Lean Product Process have become foundational tools used by product teams at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and hundreds of other companies worldwide. Through his consulting firm Olsen Solutions (founded 2005), he serves as an Interim VP of Product and strategic advisor. He also runs the Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup, which has hosted 181+ events with over 12,700 members in Mountain View, California.