Bringing LeanLaunchpad to Almaty, Kazakhstan

Last semester (Spring 2015), I taught an experimental class program at a local university where every student had to join a team, and every team had to start a real, functioning business. If you’re in Silicon Valley and this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re using the LeanLaunchpad program pioneered by Dr. Steve Blank at Stanford and UC Berkeley (go bears!)

We had a lot of challenges. Kazakhstan, for all of its immense potential, still grapples with a Soviet legacy, particularly in the way large organizations are managed. And when you combine that with a class that is innovative by US standards, everyone involved with LeanLaunchpad here had to overcome a treadmill of hurdles, both bureaucratic and cultural.

Despite these difficulties, however, and with zero external funding, over 70% of my students made some sort of profit. The top team, an event organizer leveraging Instagram, realized over $2mn tenge in profit (~$10k usd). To place that in perspective, that is roughly just about the national average income here. Other teams were also very impressive, ranging from a peer-to-peer version of Dropbox to a team that independently discovered Boxbee’s rental model.

This year I hope to grow LeanLaunchpad in Kazakhstan. Not only by teaching this program at more universities, but by creating a place where students and entrepreneurs can find and help each other. At the same time, I hope that the international community outside of Kazakhstan starts to notice the potential here — and thus this journal on Medium.