Join 500 Startups for WMD (aka “Weapons of Mass Distribution”). It’s a one-day growth conference focused on marketing and distribution hack tips for startups.

See agenda and more info here.

Based on the newest book from Eric Ries, The Leader’s Guide, this workshop is targeted toward senior leaders, decision-makers, key stakeholders and LS coaches – in summary, the enablers of a Lean Startup culture within an organization. Lean Startup Co. Training Faculty Marilyn Gorman will use the latest examples and real-life, change-management experiences to help participants understand how to leverage the systems, structures, and strategies needed to execute Lean Startup principles in a wide range of environments, while sharing an opportunity to learn from others on the same journey.

Joining Marilyn will be Janice Fraser, Director, People Team with Pivotal, who will be sharing her own examples of scaling Lean Startup in such diverse enterprises as the Federal Government, Proctor & Gamble and more.

— LUNCH BREAK: 12:30 – 1:15pm

Learn how Breather, Carbon Five, Farmgirl Flowers, Github, and Pivotal create environments for big breakthroughs. You’ll hear about their vibes and values, tour inspiring spaces, and connect with other entrepreneurs who are leading change. Gold Pass holders have the opportunity to attend up to three private Startup Tours around San Francisco. Registration required: please refer to your Lean Startup Week Survival Guide email for sign-up instructions to Gold Pass activities.

Groups meet at the Hyatt and depart from hotel.

The attitude of the team that will work on a startup project is a critical first success factor, way before finding the product/market fit. Through a quick experiment and sharing an analysis of key startup activities, Philippe will demonstrate the value of some specific soft skills of any startup team.

Steli Efti and Hiten Shah are serial entrepreneurs who have founded multi-million dollar SaaS startups. In this Q&A session, you’ll get unfiltered insights and actionable advice straight from the trenches of startup and business life. Bring questions about your toughest, most challenging Lean Startup and business opportunities!

Open to all pass holders.

Michael and Kirk will review how Clevertech partnered with Dicom, a dominant Quebec based shipping and logistics company, to reinvent how their customers interact with the Dicom technology platform. They used a lean product development cycle to rapidly ship and deploy new technology in an industry where “new” is scary and delays can mean millions in lost revenue, that allowed Dicom customers to start shipping into the United States for the first time in 30 years.

Learn how Macy’s, a 150-year-old retail giant, went from testing one Lean team to funding 22 Lean teams in two years. The retailer’s journey is one of eating its own dog food – continuously testing, learning, and using build-measure-learn cycles, customer feedback, and business results to make believers out of even the most skeptical stakeholders and partners. Cindy Peterson and Janel Wellborn will share their top ten learnings that you can apply to scaling Lean in a large enterprise.

By running a Lean hackathon for underprivileged communities in Guam and DC, Lean Mobile Apps was able to maximize visibility for their idea. By tapping into their team resources to implement no-nonsense strategies with measurable results, they brought in relevant users—who then provided solid data that appealed to would-be investors and sponsors.

How do you create meaningful relationships with your most loyal customers? By measuring and learning about their needs in order to build the right product. For B2C, one of the best ways to measure in the early days of product development is by using social analytics. The data collected can help you understand your target better, deliver the right message, and develop a tailored experience.

After the economic collapse of 2008 and a devastating writers strike, selling an original screenplay in Hollywood became a more difficult proposition than ever before. Dikran Ornekian and his partner Rylend Grant will talk about how this harsh environment pushed them into trying something different — testing their script ideas as short stories — and how this new approach opened more doors for them than any screenplay ever had.

For most people, local government is something you don’t think about unless there’s an emergency. But civic organizations touch more lives than local businesses. So why then do so many local governments get stymied by organizational cultures that publicly punish mistakes and reward safety instead of following any semblance of modern business practices? Kelly McAdoo shares the story of how the City of Hayward, California has applied Lean Startup to improve resident satisfaction, empower employees, and prioritize scarce resources while also providing the ability to measure the impact of their actions on the community.

Just Not Sorry is an international sensation used by people in over 200 countries. Its creator, Tami Reiss, attributes the company’s incredible growth to the Lean principles they employed when building the Gmail plug-in. Learn how they validated their idea, defined their MVP, and iterated their way to success during development and after launch in everything from the name and functionality to the tweets and landing page messaging.

Hear how business leaders from multi-billion dollar organizations are getting outside their comfort zone to take part in a transformational experience and embrace Lean Startup practices and principles that leave a lasting impact on individuals and their organizations.

Creating space for innovation to thrive in an existing business is challenging but possible with communication and patience, not unlike raising children. Learn how BabyCenter’s Beth Sordi has led her team to seek out, test, and validate new business models using testing dashboards, two-factor tests, and well-constructed consumer interactions without disturbing her company’s core business.

Infusing Lean Startup into a large organization is hard. This lightning talk with Travelport Labs’ design manager Nicole Shephard highlights the screw-ups, successes, and insights gleaned from years spent testing and refining a Lean Startup-centered innovation program at the $2B travel technology company.

Magoosh, a company that creates web and mobile apps to help students prepare for standardized tests, embedded Lean Startup principles into its core values to great success. CEO Bhavin Parikh will provide a concrete example of how those values helped an individual on his team use Lean Startup to invalidate a feature hypothesis.

The team behind a new product is the most important ingredient to its success. But how do you pick the right team? What do you look for? And if you are in a large enterprise looking to field multiple innovation teams, how do you maximize your chances for success? This talk looks at the lessons Janet Bumpas learned running selection processes for internal innovation efforts at large enterprise companies.

You have a vision for how your venture is going to change the world. But how do you align that big picture with the practical elements of running a business? Lynn Johnson will speak about the importance of creating a “Culture Code” as a framework for integrating your vision and values into every aspect of your day-to-day business operations.

The years you spend creating a startup is often time filled with regret, joy, pain and — hopefully someday—success. In this presentation, Rand Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz, will talk about how his company, which started as a personal blog while he was deeply in debt, evolved into a $40m+ revenue/year software business. Rand won’t pull punches or hide the truth. Instead he’ll offer an unvarnished, transparent look inside the hardest and rarely-talked-about aspects of building a company.

Matthew Brimer is a social entrepreneur, community builder, and general mischief instigator with a penchant for turning experiments into businesses and art projects into global movements. He’ll share his entrepreneurial journey and lessons learned from building GoCrossCampus, General Assembly, the global Daybreaker dance party series, and beyond.

Melinda Jacobs, co-founder of Lucent Sky, gathers sales and product feedback from customers on three continents. She’ll describe the impact cultural customs and norms have on how feedback and customer development take place, with a focus on how to adapt Lean methodologies into diverse cultural settings.

“I feel great when I’m treated badly,” said no one ever. People are the nucleus of any successful business. Breather Co-Founder and CCO, Caterina Rizzi, talks about why your business is nothing without the people who use your product and why treating them like it’s their birthday is the secret sauce to a strong, relatable and memorable experience. At Breather, they’ve built empathy, humility and service into their core brand values and have found that the more you give, the more you get.

Jason Fried, co-founder & CEO of Basecamp, joins us to talk about leading business teams in a way that supports the Lean Startup practice – collaborative, productive, efficient.

IBM is on a mission to create a sustainable culture of design and to bring a human-centered focus to its thousands of products and services. Since 2013, the company has hired over 1,100 designers to work alongside engineers and business leaders across the company. In this multidisciplinary setting, how does the Lean Startup approach interplay with design thinking? How can teams bridge the gap between user experience insights and real business opportunities? Phil Gilbert, General Manager of IBM Design, will discuss how IBM’s approach to continuous innovation at a global scale is transforming the way the company works.

Design has the power to shape how we think and feel. It’s also the tangible manifestation of intention. Conversely, how we create and what we design are the culmination of who we are as individuals coming together to make something for others. In this talk, Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, explores how our inner state manifests in design, and why the best thing we can do to become better designers may be to work on ourselves.

When Lean-curious companies get stalled implementing the practice, they’ll often cite organizational complexities, politics, and dependencies as insurmountable obstacles. The methodology can be scaled, though — not just as culture and philosophy, but as tactical process. In this practical presentation offering detailed case studies, Jeff Gothelf (author of Lean UX and the upcoming Sense and Respond) will share several methods for scaling Lean Startup techniques in large organizations. Jeff will cover knowledge management, intra-team dependencies, infrastructure requirements, and several other elements of ensuring successful Lean Startup practices in companies of any size.

Hillary Hartley joins us to deliver an update on how 18F is applying Lean Startup to innovate and change government, and the key lessons that any organization can learn from their examples.

As Tren Griffin will explain, the entrepreneurs founding startups with the biggest impact are missionaries who are laser focused on implementing the insight at the core of their business. Mercenaries are driven by monetary rewards and fame. Mercenaries seldom have the necessary desire to change the world, a desire that would otherwise enable them to persevere through hardship and create a world-changing business.

Across industries, the ability to grow your business without overinvesting resources is of utmost importance. Nonprofits face a unique challenge in being forced to run a lean ship without the safety net of VC money. The Sama team has turned constraints in resources into lessons on being mindful in how they run and build their business. Wendy Gonzalez, SVP & Managing Director of Samasource, explains how to apply nonprofit tactics to ensure the long-term success of your company, regardless of your funding source or the type of business you run.

Looking to save your team countless hours and dollars? To get unstuck? Learn how the design sprint can give you a superpower: the ability to build and test nearly any idea in just 40 hours. The sprint—a five-day process for answering critical business questions through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas—is a “greatest hits” of battle-tested business processes any team can use. Sharing this shortcut to learning and innovation is Jake Knapp, creator of Google Ventures’ sprint process, co-creator of Google Hangouts, and author of The New York Times bestseller Sprint.

Kara Goldin, founder of the multi-million dollar company Hint Water, shares the story behind Hint’s phenomenal growth. She’ll explain how she’s managed to turn her business into a social mission, what she’s learned from Silicon Valley, and she’ll share advice for entrepreneurs.

Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, explains the lessons he learned from Steve Jobs and how they apply to startups.

Sam Parr is founder of Hustle Con Media, one of the fastest growing media companies in the U.S. Sam joins Lean Startup Co. contributing editor Jennifer Maerz to talk about how he grew his brand to 3 million readers in eight months, and how he continues to push the boundaries through experimentation and relentless community development.

Your company culture comes to life in your company meetings. How you plan, run, and follow-through on your team sessions impacts almost every aspect of how your people work together. Mamie Kanfer Stewart, founder and CEO of Meeteor, describes how to align your meeting practices with a Lean Startup mindset to support a culture of innovation and collaboration.