How Google’s venture capital team gets ideas off the ground
How Google’s venture capital team gets ideas off the ground
At the office, it’s sometimes easier to talk about getting things done than actually doing them. But if you operate that way as a startup, your company could be dead before you ever make a product.
At GV — the venture capital division of Alphabet (formerly known as Google) — they’re perfecting away to get ideas off the ground quickly and help out the companies in their portfolio: companies like Nest, Slack and Uber.
The method is called a “sprint.” It was borrowed from the software engineering world and expanded for Google’s own product development. Sprints are five-day challenges with a specific agenda: to rapidly test an idea in the real world.
Jake Knapp is with GV, a former designer at Google and the creator of Google Hangouts. He writes about how how to use the sprint method at any company in his book, “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.”
Click the audio player above to hear our conversation with Knapp
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