Fireside Chat with Sebastian Thrun

I did a fun fireside chat with one of my most favorite people – Sebastian Thrun – at the Udacity conference. Sebastian is the embodiment of a renaissance person. I first heard about him when his driverless car won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He founded Google X and led the development of the Google self-driving car. He was a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and before that at Carnegie Mellon University.

And he asks great questions.

If you can’t see the video click here

1:17 Hacking for Defense (Why did we create it? What is it?)

3:30 Lean Startup (What is it? How it started, How did the class get on Udacity)

5:30 Pricing (Customer Validation, Sales, Pricing)

8:30 Customer Discovery (What is the Lean Stack)

10:13 What Advice Would You Give to Yourself at 18?

12:37 Small Businesses vs. Scalable Startups (Should I take Risk Capital)

15:48 Can you Teach Entrepreneurship?

19:03 What’s the Craziest Problem I’ve Ever Seen? (The Navy SEAL’s)

21:25 How Do You Find Out What Customers Really Want? (Customer Discovery, Pivots)