Eric Ries, the driving force behind the lean startup movement, announced Sunday on his blog Lessons Learned the creation of two scholarships for lean startups to attend upcoming conferences. A lean startup is one that takes advantage of various techniques and technologies to produce a product at minimal cost, while continually revising and iterating based on customer feedback.
The newly announced scholarships will provide lean startups with the opportunity to attend the Startup Lessons Learned conference in mid-April and the Web 2.0 Expo in early May. The Startup Lessons Learned conference is a pet project of Ries’, and is sponsored by the company he helped co-found, IMVU.
“This conference will be the first of its kind: an opportunity to have a conversation about the future of the lean startup movement,” writes Ries on his blog. “We want everyone who can contribute to that conversation to be there, regardless of their ability to pay.”
Ries has also distributed discount codes for the conference to leaders of various Lean Startup Meetup groups. Those attending the event will have the opportunity to learn from an impressive list of speakers, including Steve Blank, Dave McClure, Damon Horowitz and Max Ventilla of Aardvark, and even Clara Shih, whose book The Facebook Era was mentioned in our Weekend Reading series.
The second scholarship provides access to the Web 2.0 expo and to its Lean Startup Intensive, which Ries agreed to organize with the promise of the scholarship opportunity. Applications for the two scholarships are open until April 12 and April 15, respectively.
Lean startups have been growing in popularity as startups learn to become more independent and to make more from less, especially in these rough economic and tepid venture capital times. It only makes sense that Ries would organize these scholarships since most lean startups that would benefit from attending these events might see them as unnecessary costs. If your startup is looking to run on a low burn, applying for these scholarships is a great idea for the opportunity to learn from and network with other entrepreneurs with lean experience.
