Exponentially: the story so far…(feat: small Italian cigars)
Exponentially has just turned three, and while the last few years have felt like a wild ride - running over 1000 pretotypes, training over 800 pretotypers across the world, and launching our online course - it occurred to us that you may not know much about Exponentially’s story. So we sat down to ask our founder Leslie how we got here...
“It all started in 2016 when I incessantly nagged Alberto Savoia (Google's Innovation Agitator Emeritus, and the founder of pretotyping) from across the world until he agreed to train me in pretotyping at Stanford. I had already become an expert in failure on both sides of the fence: I spent many years running enterprise innovation teams and seeing most projects fail; I had also founded five start-ups, sold two, and completely destroyed three. So I knew that pretotyping would be gold, and I wanted to learn from Alberto.
“In 2017, I registered ‘Exponential Innovation’ at the airport on the way to a Singularity University Global Summit. At this stage, nothing else at Exponentially actually existed - I was pretotyping my pretotyping business! My first experiment was an Infiltrator pretotype: I had business cards printed and mailed to my hotel, so that I would have something interesting to use to start a conversation at this conference. Thankfully, it worked - or I might have killed the whole idea!
“Soon after, I shared sushi (and a sneaky Italian cigar) with Alberto in a park in Mountain View. On a handshake, I agreed to pretotype the pretotyping business in APAC, and he agreed to let me incorporate his workshop material into my training. I ran my first workshop with RACV 30 days later, and then invented (on the fly, with a customer) and delivered our first two-week rapid experimentation sprint. And that pretotype worked, too! Idea = validated!
“By 2018, we were ready to scale - we worked with some of Australia's top companies, and launched the Exponentially app, a tool we use to run and record experiments at scale. Alberto started calling me “The Plato to his Socrates” - he had all the theory, but I was able to make it immediately applicable and practical, and then deliver it at scale.
“In 2019, Alberto launched his book The Right It (I even got a mention on page 248!), and I flew twice around the world delivering workshops and speaking on pretotyping. We also accidentally launched the first Pretotyping Global Summit after I pitched the idea over a few beers to some clients. To my surprise I got skin in the game a few days later from 5 clients and it was on. I had to rip a rabbit out of a hat and set it up, and Alberto agreed to host us for a day in Palo Alto.
“Three years after starting Exponentially, I am proud to have run over 1000 pretotypes with customers, saving them $13 million by not building the wrong ‘it,’ and have trained over 800 pretotypers and 150 start-up and scale-up founders across the world. Most recently, we’ve launched "Project 10x" - online training to train the next 10000 pretotypers and run the next 10000 pretotypes.”
At Exponentially, we are dedicated to teaching pretotyping at scale, and the global pretotyping community is stronger than ever and growing every day. We recently launched our Slack community alongside our online course, to give people around the world direct, personal access to Leslie and Alberto Savoia, and to learn how to fail fast, and fail better, with pretotyping. Join us - we would love to see you there.