Description: “No startup business plan survives first contact with customers.”- Steve Blank
This quote from Steve Blank, co-author of the “Startup Owners Manual” is a riff on the original quote by German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke who said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Your customers are not your enemy, but if you don’t know them and what they want they will quickly turn on you. It is your job as an entrepreneur to research your potential market, i.e. your customers, before spending a lot of money developing your product or service. In this talk, I will discuss how to develop a business model using my own model as a template. I will make the assumption that you are interested in my service and my job in this talk is to convince you, my potential customers, that my minimal viable product (MVP) is something that you would buy. As your business model develops so does your MVP allowing you to target your potential customers. Your potential clients job is to give you feedback on your business plan. By doing this, I will show you how to pivot from your current model to a new model going through many iterations until you make the final decision to pivot or proceed.
Bio: Scott A. Jeffers started his research career as an undergraduate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins Colorado. He studied insecticide resistance and caught the research bug. He went to graduate school at Purdue University in West Lafayette Indiana where he studied the Ebola virus and how it enters cells. In 2003, the same year that SARS emerged in China, infected over 8,000 people and killed over 800, Scott was looking for his first post doctoral position. His thesis advisor suggested that he contact Kathryn Holmes at the University of Colorado in Denver. Two weeks later he was back in Colorado and working to find a receptor to the SARS coronavirus. He spent five years in Colorado, where he did find a receptor. He also learned a lot about virology, construct design, and protein expression and purification. Looking for new challenges Scott applied for, and won, the Pasteur Foundation Fellowship that paid for a three year experience at the Pasteur Institut in Paris France. In Paris, Scott joined an X-ray crystallography laboratory where he studied the bunyaviruses, a large group of viruses, some of which are emerging viruses like Rift Valley Fever virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, and Hantaan virus. He learned how these viruses use complex biological machinery to enter cells, about new protein production techniques,and by going to the Cold Spring Harbor Crystallography course, how to solve protein structures using X-ray crystallography. He moved to Zagreb Croatia where he has been working with the Rudjer Boskovic institute to set up a protein production CRO. Scott is a scientist, an entrepreneur, and a new father to a two month old baby boy.
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