5 dollars and two hours

VentureBeat posted a video about the Stanford Venture Program, which gave a few groups of students $5 and two hours, with the goal of who can make the most money.

Nkurz on Hacker News Summarized it pretty well:

She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of ‘funding’ in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can.She cites three teams’ approaches:

1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of charging, and makes more money. Lauded for rapid iteration.

2) Second team makes lots of reservations at local restaurants, and then sells them to people waiting in line for same restaurant. Didn’t use the $5 at all. Lauded for realizing that the $5 constraint was artificial, and that using it constrained their thinking.

3) Third team skipped the exercise, and sold their 3 minute class presentation time as a advertisement to a local company. Made the most money. Instead of presenting, they recruited. Lauded for realizing that the 2 hours was also artificially hampering their thinking.

Personally, I found the presentation glib and condescending, and the solutions immoral and dishonest. I’m hoping for good discussion about the issues here, but I would not recommend the video.

I believe he thinks the solutions were immoral and dishonest because the first team initially charged a dollar for their services, when there was a free pump around the corner. However, that’s like saying Starbucks is immoral because they charge $4 dollars for milk and sugar. You can always go to the store, buy the ingredients and do it yourself.

Julian