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Startup Secrets: How to Build a Winning Value Proposition with Michael Skok
In this Harvard Innovation Labs 'Startup Secrets' workshop, veteran venture capitalist and Underscore VC founding partner Michael Skok walks a room of founders through how to define, evaluate, and build a compelling value proposition. Arguing that the number-one reason companies fail is not solving a valuable enough problem, Skok lays out a practical toolkit: nailing the 'for who,' finding a minimum viable segment, testing pain with the 'Four Us' (Unworkable, Unavoidable, Urgent, Underserved), distinguishing latent/aspirational needs from blatant/critical ones, replacing 'faster, better, cheaper' with the '3Ds' (Disruptive, Discontinuous, Defensible), and measuring the 'gain/pain ratio.' Real founders from Kazakhstan, Kenya, South Africa, and beyond pressure-test their ideas live as Skok returns again and again to one refrain: stop pitching, and go ask your users.
LeveragePoint Innovations
LeveragePoint is a Boston-area B2B SaaS company that helps enterprises quantify, communicate, and capture the economic value of their products. Spun out of Monitor Group's Strategic Pricing practice in 2009, its cloud platform turns static spreadsheets and slide decks into interactive value propositions and ROI stories that sales teams use to justify higher prices and win more deals. It serves manufacturing, specialty chemicals, high tech, healthcare, and software companies, and is extending into value marketing and AI-assisted value modeling.
Peyton Marshall
Peyton Marshall is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of LeveragePoint, a Newton, Massachusetts SaaS company that helps B2B firms quantify, communicate, and capture the economic value of what they sell. An economist by training with a PhD from MIT, he spent twelve years in investment banking in London at UBS and Goldman Sachs, then fifteen years as a CFO and operator in healthcare and IT companies, before founding LeveragePoint in 2009 to turn value-based pricing from a theory into an everyday sales tool. He has grown the company to multi-million-dollar revenue without raising venture capital.