Get to Know Jonathan Bertfield, Lean Startup Co.’s New CEO
Big news from Lean Startup Co.: We have a new CEO, Jonathan Bertfield!
If you’ve been following Lean Startup Co. for a while, you may already be familiar with Jonathan. For the past nine years through his work at Lean Startup Co.—first as senior faculty, then as a senior director—Jonathan has helped guide teams from Fortune 100 firms and high-growth startups alike through innovation programs, product validation, and culture change.
But we thought you might want to get to know Jonathan a bit more. What can we expect from him as CEO and how does he envision the future of Lean Startup Co.? Here’s a sneak preview of what’s to come.
Jonathan’s superpowers: Guiding teams through innovation, transformation, and fundamental mindset shifts
Jonathan brings a global perspective and two decades of experience driving innovation at the intersection of technology, education, and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining Lean Startup Co., he held senior product positions at multiple educational technology enterprises, including Pearson, Sesame Workshop, Scholastic, Mindscape, and The Learning Company. He was a founder and early team member of multiple startups in the educational technology and gaming sectors—experiences that shaped his belief in the power of agile, entrepreneurial thinking inside large organizations.
Jonathan’s work in both startups and corporations frames his perspective on searching for the required balance between scrappy startup patterns and formalized corporate realities. He has worked within and as an advisor to a huge community of product practitioners and leaders who are using Lean Startup principles, even if they don’t use that specific language. “Many practitioners don’t even call it Lean Startup anymore—they simply see it as the standard for how modern products are built,” says Jonathan.
Why was this the right time to step into the CEO role? “I spent the last nine years getting ready for this role, even if I didn’t realize it at the time,” says Jonathan. He credits the past five years working closely with former Lean Startup Co. CEO Ben Hafele for giving him the strong foundation that prepared him to take on this challenge.
Innovation and transformation, growth and change, and experimentation and iteration are the values that guide Jonathan’s work. The opportunity to guide people and organizations through fundamental mindset shifts is what motivates him, and he’s already bringing this point of view to Lean Startup Co.
Jonathan’s vision for Lean Startup Co.
In recent years, Lean Startup Co. customers have skewed more toward larger, established corporations, but Jonathan sees a new opportunity on the horizon. “I’m very excited to get back to our roots and add startups and SMBs to the client mix.”
In addition to this new focus on startups and SMBs, Jonathan outlines three objectives for Lean Startup Co.:
- Maximize the impact of Lean Startup on the global community of entrepreneurs
- Amplify the stories of practitioners employing Lean Startup in their work
- Build a sustainable growth business
Navigating complex attitudes about growth
Speaking of growth, Jonathan admits that the biggest challenge he sees for Lean Startup Co. is to avoid the trap of falling into being a professional services org with an emphasis on revenue and growth at all costs.
When Jonathan was preparing to take on the CEO role, he had an honest conversation with Founder Eric Ries. Here’s how Jonathan relays it: “Eric asked me an important question: ‘Is growth good?’ My answer was, ‘If we want to maximize our impact on the entrepreneurial community, then we need to grow to meet that opportunity.’”
Jonathan sees his challenge as finding the right balance between pursuing purpose and profit. While there is an imperative to grow in order to expand Lean Startup Co.’s impact, that’s not the same as pursuing growth simply for growth’s sake. Jonathan adds, “Our roots are in delivering deep expertise and impact for our customers, not just in maximizing the operational efficiency of our services. If we want to meet the opportunity ahead of us, we need to grow purposefully.”
This is a topic we’ll be exploring more in the future, so watch this space for deeper dives into how Lean Startup Co. (and our community) is navigating complex attitudes about growth.
What’s to come
What can you expect to see from Lean Startup Co. with Jonathan at its helm? Here’s where Jonathan sees us focusing our efforts in the near term:
Continuing to commit to content
We’re thrilled to announce that Lean Startup Co. is launching an exclusive YouTube series designed to transform how you think about corporate innovation. This isn’t just another business show – it’s your front-row seat to real-world insights, proven methodologies, and game-changing strategies that Fortune 500 companies use to innovate like startups.
We’re also going to be highlighting some of the amazing work that’s been done over the last decade inside entrepreneurship departments at major business schools in the US and Europe. “This is a treasure trove of material we’ll be bringing off the shelf of Masters and PhD programs to make it accessible to the Lean Startup community,” Jonathan explains.
Bringing a fresh perspective to partnerships
You may have seen recent updates about our workshop in London with the Rapidworks team and the Lean AI workshop with Sense and Respond Learning’s co-founders Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf. We’re experimenting on a number of new partner programs that we’ll be announcing in the coming months. According to Jonathan, “The goal is a network that leverages the Lean Startup brand to reach a much wider audience.”
Thank you for being part of the Lean Startup community. We hope that you’ll join us in welcoming Jonathan as CEO and you’ll benefit from the innovation and perspective he’s bringing to this role. To stay up to date on the latest Lean Startup Co. news and how Jonathan is bringing his vision to life, make sure to follow Lean Startup on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter!