So I recently retired from facilitating and organizing Startup Weekend and Startup Next.

But fear not. I’m not going away and I’m not about to stop caring about entrepreneurial education for startup founders in our region. On the contrary, I’m ramping up my efforts.

That’s why I have chosen to offer the Lean Launchpad (LLP), the world’s premier pre-accelerator program from Stanford, Berkeley and hundreds of other universities and used by numerous F500 companies, FOR FREE to early-stage startups.

The LLP Düsseldorf program will start at the end of October this year, and stay tuned for announcements of speakers and mentors!

Come to the informational pre-event at Startplatz Düsseldorf on October 14th at 1800 hrs BER time where I will explain what the LLP is all about and what startup teams can expect to get out of the program.

How to Apply

To apply you simply have to be an unfunded early-stage startup that is prepared to work insanely hard with me for 5 weeks and be present at Startplatz Düsseldorf for 5x weekly evening meetups and send me an email with your pitch deck at [email protected] with “LLP DUS” in the subject. We have a limited amount of teams we can take in – so snooze you lose.

If you want to sponsor us, let’s talk.

If you want to organize and teach the Lean Launchpad, you can too – it’s open source!

In the name of radical transparency and open source, I’ve shared my presentation for sponsors and stakeholders with you – feel free to use it any way you see fit. Here are the Keynote and the Powerpoint files too.

Here is the structured video course content with Steve Blank on Udacity.

Here are many more Customer Development resources for your LLP program.

Here are the first 50 pages of the Startup Owner’s Manual. And you might want to buy the paper version for the teams, depending on the level of your funding. It’s a great reference.

About The Lean Launchpad

The Lean Launchpad is the highly experiential and evidence-based entrepreneurship curriculum developed by the father of Lean Startup, Steve Blank at Berkeley and Stanford.

It is also used in corporations as a pre-acceleration qualifier in global F500 corporations like Deutsche Telekom, GM, Time Warner, Coca Cola and governmental organizations like The National Science Foundation.

The Lean LaunchPad is currently taught at over 200 universities and at over 40 incubators and accelerators worldwide.

The  curriculum is available with a 1, 5 and 12 weeks syllabus depending on scope, depth and educational goals.

The target audience are college and university students, product managers, innovation managers, project managers, decision makers tasked with growth and innovation, pre-acceleration stage startups or business units.

About The Methodology

This 5 weeks version of the LLP program consists of five evening meetups moderated by an LLP Educator with hands-on homework between each class.

The LLP Educator will also be available online (Skype, mobile, email) to mentor you and clarify issues that come up in between classes.

Half of the day consists of lectures that outline the core concepts during class, in the second half the students will get to apply and practice the core concepts of the lecture of the day and prepare for their homework assignments.

In addition a lot of the time is spent outside of the classroom doing practical, hands-on homework in between, learning outside the classroom, learning in the the actual market.

See you there!