“Bare Essentials – A Practical Guide to Building a Lean Startup”, was followed with an extended Q & A session. Background: The 'Lean Startup' term was popularized by entrepreneur Eric Reis on his blog “Startup Lessons Learned” and in his 2011 best selling book - ”The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”. From last week’s talk and discussion, here are the key Lounge47 takeaways: 1) Lean Startup philosophy prescribes “experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional upfront big design” 2) Rather than develop a conventional business plan, build a business model after executing key steps - a. Develop hypotheses b. Test hypotheses by getting feedback from potential users, purchasers and partners c. Develop product “iteratively and incrementally with minimum waste of resources”, including time. Basically, Build, Measure & Learn quickly 3) Lean Startup founders discuss their ideas and seek feedback rather than operate in secrecy or “stealth mode” 4) Popular terms - MVP (Minimum Viable Product): a minimum version of product that “cuts the fat, not the essence”; Pivot (a sudden shift in strategy) affecting any and all critical moving parts of the business. The Lean Startup is more a mindset and approach – there is no recipe book and founders have to make judgment calls for their Startups. The Q&A addressed such specific issues.