You can’t teach entrepreneurship in a classroom, but Bob Dorf’s blend of hands-on experiential learning and real world examples and experiences have helped train literally thousands of startup people all over the world. Whether the training is half a day or spans several months, Bob’s Startup Owner’s Boot Camps provide a fast-paced, high-energy training on business models and customer development.

Bob Dorf is among the most qualified startup educators, and regularly teaches one-week and full-semester courses in Customer Development at Columbia Business School in New York City. He has guest lectured and conducted workshops at NYU, MIT, University of Maryland and a host of others, and often trains startup coaches and mentors as well as the founders themselves.

“There’s no better way to learn than to get your head kicked in,” says Bob, who’s had it happen more than a few times in his 42-year startup career. He does his best to bring those real world lessons to the fore in his training programs throughout the world. The programs include in-class and “get out of the building” projects and experience for students, as well as rapid-fire feedback for teams as they iterate and pivot their business models.

Startup programs delivering the greatest impact include:

1. One day immersions covering the basics of business models and customer development.
   
   
2. Startup Owner’s Boot Camps, generally 2 or 3 days of intensive, hands-on training
   
   
3. 8-10 Week Indepth Training, blending three in-person deep dives with Skype mentoring
   in the intermediate weeks to take a startup idea from “cocktail napkin” to traction.
   
   

Bob has trained startups and their trainers on four continents:

Startup Academy/Moscow
A three-day intensive program for startup founders, who continue on with local faculty in a ten-week “Startup Academy” program. To date, 100+ program graduates have raised more than $4-million in funding and created far more in valuation.

Apps.Co/Colombian Government
Two 8-week program cycles have graduated more than 50 startup teams, with nearly 1/3 generating customer revenue and marketplace traction by “graduation day.”

Training the Trainers/Startup Weekend NEXT
Training a global cadre of startup mentors and coaches has been a critical component of the highly-successful global NEXT program from Startup Weekend. Bob developed training materials, videos and more for this program and supported the work of his co-author Steve Blank in curriculum and content development.

One- and Two-Day Workshops
Led by Bob on at least a monthly basis all over the world. They’re tailored to the audience, its experience level, and help drive innovation inside established companies as well as within the newest of early-stage startups.

Established Corporations
Bob has trained teams of internal innovators from some of the largest corporations in the land, including GE, Carvajal SA, and Merck, among many others. Corporate training programs range from single day workshops to--for GE--a yearlong program to train, coach and help propel a bold new innovative product line forward to many millions of new revenue dollars.