As with value, it’s essential that entrepreneurs understand the reasons behind a startup’s growth.

5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

It is also the right way to think about productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we’re getting for our efforts.4

Unlike in a focus group, her goal would be to measure what the customers actually did.

For the growth hypothesis, which tests how new customers will discover a product or service, we can do a similar analysis. Once the program is up and running, how will it spread among the employees, from initial early adopters to mass adoption throughout the company? A likely way this program could expand is through viral growth. If that is true, t

how effective the student-to-student peer-driven learning method was for his students.

My goal in advocating a scientific approach to the creation of startups is to channel human creativity into its most productive form, and there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

When students could help each other, they benefited in two ways. First, they could get customized instruction from a peer who was much less intimidating than a teacher. Second, they could reinforce their learning by teaching it to others.

Five dollars bought us a hundred clicks—every day. From a marketing point of view this was not very significant, but for learning it was priceless. Every single day we were able to measure our product’s performance with a brand new set of customers.