Week #1 - 01/19/17

We just held our first class last Thursday and, unsurprisingly, the students got a rude awakening in how different this course will be from others they have taken at grad school. 

In a sweltering room at Columbia’s Engineering School, we kicked things off with an overview of the class. Hacking for Energy is unique to other courses in that it is designed to simultaneously educate students about entrepreneurship and the energy sector. The first half of each class will be a traditional Lean LaunchPad style presentation and feedback session, where students present their Business Model Canvas every week and get feedback from our panel of experienced entrepreneurship judges. The second half of each class will be lectures about the energy sector led by Travis Bradford, the Director of the Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Travis is a thought leader in how to teach energy and environmental topics, and he also helped launch Greentech Media and the Carbon War Room. The students are getting a real treat learning from him.

We then introduced the students to the entrepreneurship instructors and mentors that are on hand to help out with the course. When we solicited for additional teaching talent to participate  in the class, we received an overwhelmingly positive response from top teachers and mentors in entrepreneurship. We are pretty excited about the instructional talent we have on hand.

Entrepreneurship Instructors

Andrea Nye - Andrea is the Director of the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership, a unique biomedical technology accelerator program established to facilitate commercialization of clinical solutions driven by teams of engineers and clinicians.

Dave Petrillo - Teaches entrepreneurship at Cooper Union and is the founder of Coffee Joulies, a company that developed a phase-change material that regulates coffee temperature.

Blake Stevens - Blake is the Vice President of the investment firm Harris and Harris Group. He specializes in working with its earliest stage companies.

Ivy Schultz - Ivy is the Associate Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Columbia’s School of Engineering.

Student Team Mentors  

Fernando Gomez-Baquero - Fernando is the founder of BessTech and is also a mentor for NYSERDA’s EIR program.​

Karen Morris - Karen was the first chief innovation officer for AIG and consults on innovation strategy and execution

Robert Colao is an executive with years of experience in intellectual property and licensing. He has served as an “Executive-in-Residence” for Columbia Technology Ventures 

David Dabscheck is the founder of Giant Innovation, a firm that provides innovation training to Fortune 500 companies. He also teaches innovation at the Columbia Business School.

Nicholas Wood is the former CEO and founder of Emosyn LLC, a fabless semiconductor company in the smart card and security markets. He has served as an “Executive-in-Residence” for Columbia Technology Ventures

Joel Ndreu is an in-house electrical and engineering expert at Related. His most recent start-up, 10Six Inc., which focused on distributed energy storage management, was acquired by Aerea Digital Energy Resources in Q4 2014. 

Given the size of the class, Hacking for Energy has an incredible suite of instructional resources, with 7 entrepreneurship instructors and 6 mentors for the 6 teams. One thing that we will be on the lookout this semester is whether the students will take advantage of the resources that we have gathered, and whether they will take their advice to heart.

Prior to kicking off the student presentations, we stressed a couple of key important notes that will guide how we will run the class (and how students should approach the class).

Diving right in: The Student Presentations
As mentioned before, the student presentations comprise half of each class session, and are modeled after the NSF I-Corps “relentlessly direct” presentation and feedback style. Prior to kicking off this section, we stressed some key considerations that they should keep in mind, both in how we run the class and how they should approach it.

• The teaching style: This class is probably unlike any other class that they have taken, and they may find our critiques harsh at first. We call this style “relentlessly direct.” We are simulating the fast-paced & demanding startup/entrepreneurial culture in order to get the most out of the teams. We have high expectations and will hold all of the teams to them!
• The workload: The workload is intense for this course (10-15 hours each week of interviewing, compiling and uploading the interviews into our project management system, watching our online lectures, and readings for the energy lectures). We have been open about the workload from the beginning, and we expect all the team members to keep up with this class.
• Ditch & Despair: At some point, we know the teams will start to feel “Ditch & Despair.” It may be because they are struggling to secure interviews, feel lost about what the solution’s true value propositions are, or a variety of other reasons. We reassured the teams not to worry because they will come out the other side.

We started the student presentations, and recognized quickly that Lean LaunchPad and its Question and Answer-style was new to most of the students taking the class. It led to some comical interactions between the students, teaching team, and instructors. We also love that the mentors jumped right in and gave their 2 cents as well.

Some gems from Class 1:

A student referring to their “Team Slide” - “I guess my expertise got me the title of “Chief Scientist”, so that is great!”

Another student: “We did not realize what the colors {on the BMC} meant, but now we know!”

While one team was describing their solution:
Instructor A: “I have no idea what you are doing”
Instructor B: “I second that!”


When a presenting team started talking about their desire for lots of data, a mentor chimed in and said, “Don’t go and just try to get data, you have to go to talk to customers. If you collect a lot of data that is not relevant to the customers, it is useless.” It was great to see the mentors jumping in to support the teaching team/instructors and double down on our mantra: listen to the customers!

Here are the first week of presentations:

Team Li-Ion NYU is aiding NYU’s Office of Sustainability as they transition their vehicle fleet to electric vehicles.

Team Aggregen is working with IBM to try and change the aggregator pricing model to allow for  the bundling, buying, and trading of energy assets.

Team EVE is helping GE to better match EV infrastructure with customers that need to charge.

Team PowYorker is figuring out if there is a way to better monitor Con Edison’s electricity and gas infrastructure assets.

Team ReAct is building an analytical app with EPRI to better connect users to their smart devices.

Team Sustainable Catalyst Group is determining how SolarCity can best build a “Shared Solar” model for their customers.

Getting ready for next week: Customer Discovery and Interview-style.

After the presentations, we dove right into teaching students how to effectively conduct interviews for their customer discovery. Our inspiration/predecessor, Stanford’s Hacking for Defense, had students conduct 10 initial interviews prior to their course’s start. We decided against that because we recognized that most of these students have not been trained in Lean LaunchPad or effective interviewing. We discussed well-trodden recommendations and addressed common mistakes.

• Be polite and efficient with your interviews: The number one rule, when interviewing, don’t waste the other person’s time. Be transparent about why you want to talk to them, tell them how long you need to talk (and don’t go over), and then thank them for their time and effort.
• When meeting, in-person is best: The in-person meeting is best, because you can pick up on vocal changes and body language cues that are harder to decipher on video call (and impossible to decipher on the phone). If you cannot meet in person, a video call is OK (though not ideal), but steer away from phone call. And don’t do surveys or focus groups - they yield nothing.
• Start small: When interviewing, start off knowing that you will be a lot better at it after you have done a few. Allow yourself time to perfect and refine your customer discovery skills. Never start with your dream customer: Imagine you have a chance to interview Elon Musk about problems with batteries - when would you want to talk to him? Interview 5 or Interview 75? Obviously the latter, since you may never get a chance to speak to him again, and you want to as ready as possible for your shot.
• Don’t sell, don’t sell, DON’T SELL: We cannot stress this enough. These interviews are a chance for you to learn. Ask the interviewee about their job, their problems, their needs. Don’t do a demo. Don’t sell. You need to understand the problem before you test the solution.  

One thing we will be on the lookout for: if the students change (or don’t change) their interview techniques in the coming weeks.

“I could not have done this without…..” Finding and matching the best mentors.

Finally, we ended the class with matching the teams with mentors. Rather than doing a more traditional speed-dating meet-and-greet session, we decided to have each mentor work with a student team to review and critique the transcripts of teams from outside the class who had recorded their customer interviews, and then rotate to a different team after five minutes. Though it involved a lot of preparation, we liked this exercise because it gave the students and mentors an opportunity to observe each other’s work and decision-making style while also learning important interviewing techniques. In the end, it allows them to make an educated decision in who they want to work with for the next 14 weeks.    

At the end of class, we definitely felt the excitement in the air (one student even exclaimed in the hall, “Wow, this class is like the real world!”) and we hope this energy level stays up the coming weeks. Stay tuned weekly and follow us along on this journey.

Lessons Learned  - Class 1

• It was the right move to have students do their first interviews after the first class. A couple teams did interviews before the course started, and ended up talking to their dream customers in the process. We will see if those students can actually get those customers back on the phone.
• Mentors with LLP experience is a huge plus
• One thing we did not mention is how valuable a TA has been to get this class moving. If you are planning on teaching this class, at least one TA is definitely a requirement since there are lot of moving parts. Our TA is the main point of contact with the students and handles all the administrative and IT needs of the class.