Friday night I attended an event hosted by MOX, a mobile-only accelerator which is part of SOSV: The Accelerator VC. At the event Bruce Bateman, the “wearable guy”, talked about AI and the upcoming technological singularity and how it will impact jobs.

 

 

On my way to the MRT Ryan Shuken chased me down and invited me to chat about the project I’m working on. I don’t think the profound effect of someone genuinely reaching out like that can be overstated. He was also read up on what I’m working on from my application! That interaction was extremely motivating! I immediately wanted to make the content here more relevant to potential partners (investors, team members, mentors, etc.)

 

 

One of the many things Ryan does is host a podcast called “The China Startup Pulse”. I ended up listening to the episode titled “How to Startup, Step 1; with Trevor Owens, Co-Founder of The Lean Startup Machine”.

Mastering RAT (Risky Assumption Testing)

After listening to the podcast I went over to www.leanstartupmachine.com and ran into this video:

“Riskiest Assumption” kept being mentioned in the video and I had no idea what exactly that meant so I read a few articles about it…

• The MVP is dead. Long live the RAT.
• WHAT IS YOUR RISKIEST ASSUMPTION?
• How to diagnose your riskiest assumptions
• The Only Proven Method To Identify Your Riskiest Assumption

I’m coming off fresh from reading through all of those, but I think…

The basic idea of the “riskiest assumption” is to figure out which assumptions you have are the riskiest for the potential health of your business and test them as quickly as possible. If you discover that an assumption which is critical to the success of your business is false you know that you need to pivot or just trash that business idea.

This appears to be an evolution of “MVP” (minimum viable product). The whole point of the MVP is to mitigate risk but it appears that the idea behind MVP may have lost its essence over time, overly focusing on the product instead of the minimum. The MVP is really about testing assumptions so RATing is what you want to be doing before you’re MVPing.

I also watched a couple videos.

End of Day Wrap-Up

Today was a day of learning. Tomorrow I’m going to take some action on the learning! I’m going to try to keep doing these more robust updates. Some will, for sure, be more robust than others of course.