Ben Fisher

And actually, it's sort of funny how there were companies or projects before Lean Startup Machine, which Lean Startup Machine was the evolution of.

of those experiences, largely, you know, failing to start companies and probably focusing on the wrong stuff.

And at the time, um, lean start machine, like, uh, one of my partners at the time, he, uh, he'd come across like Eric's blog, lean startup, Eric, Eric Reese, correct.

Um, was, you know, it, it was just a blog.

His book hadn't come out.

and at the time we were in the new york tech scene like even startup weekend was only going around new york once a year so it was a really interesting period within at least within tech on the east coast um and a bunch of us had just graduated college we're sort of figuring out our today our first adult companies um adults mean like after after we uh had graduated into the real world and a lot of stuff wasn't working and you know the economy was kind of in

in the can.

And so what we had was, um, I think especially for, for folks who are just out of college, a lot of people who get normal jobs after school, they'll have like a cohort or like a class, like in finance or even in advertising, um, or other industries, um,

Whereas if you work at a startup or you're trying to build a company, you don't have that same sort of peer group.

And so the time, sorry.

Yeah, it started as a single weekend experiment where we were trying to have, like a hackathon is great.

And we'd actually approached Startup Weekend about just having it.

frequently having more startup weekends in New York.

And they basically were like, hey, we don't know you guys.

You're welcome to go do your own thing.

And so what was more interesting to us was we're like, all right, well, it's cool to do a hackathon.

But what would be more interesting is if it was more skills-based because you release a bunch of folks and tell them to go build something in 48 hours.

And after a while, you do that a few times, the results continue to be sort of chaotic.

Some great stuff might come out of it.

But at the time, the idea was there has to be a better way