The Lean Startup

Posted by Sean on March 15, 2012

A friend lent me The Lean Startup over the weekend, and within two days the Mother Sponge universe has experienced a significant and fundamental thought-shift. The big lesson from author Eric Ries thus far – throw out assumptions, consider what you don’t really know, and find your way through new product development by testing ideas in the real world.

In other words, EXPERIMENT!

OK, experimental science is by no means a new idea, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that choosing between assumptions and experimental evidence can make or break you as a startup searching for an attentive audience, a product that’ll sell, a business in the black! And there is no way to really know if your assumptions are true unless you witness actual customers behaving in the way you hypothesized that they would.

Ries is among several current thought leaders in marketing and business discussing relating themes right now (see Seth Godin’s Poke the Box and 37Signals’ REWORK to name just a couple). And for good reason – experimentation is a lost art. Most of us lose the gift at some point in elementary school.

So ask yourself – do you really know there’s a market that will demand your incredible new product? Before assuming anything, couldn’t you start by running very quick, very inexpensive experiments to see who’s out there and what they want? And if you continued testing and learning in short cycles, might you collect a lot of invaluable data in a short span of time?

Maybe. Probably worth finding out.

Filed in: Books, Business, Marketing Comment →

Trappist Pizza

Posted by Sean on December 27, 2011

My family has a new holiday tradition that we’ve enjoyed the last couple years – Christmas pizza! This year we took some inspiration from the famous Trappist beers of Belgium and the Netherlands. Here’s a little recap from the Mother Sponge holiday baking laboratory…

Instead of a wild yeasted sourdough starter (A.K.A. the “mother sponge”), I infused the dough with some Trappist Ale Yeast from White Labs.

A lazy pizzaiolo’s best friend, the stand mixer.

Shaping the dough balls. We made three 10″ pies per the Cheeseboard Collective Works recipe… gotta make sure we had plenty of leftovers.

The dough was more dense than my usual sourdough mix… the yeast probably needed more time to get the dough to rise. Next time I’ll make a new starter with the Trappist yeast and give it plenty of time to reach full strength.

Tossing the pies! The dough may have not risen as much as I would have liked, but it made stretching and tossing the dough really easy.

Our favorite family recipe is a “New Mexican” pie, with roasted poblano chiles, corn, pine nuts, goat cheese, mozzarella, and cilantro. Nothing like 70 degree San Diego weather for a camp stove session on the front porch!

We don’t have a wood fired oven (yet!), but a pizza stone helps to finish the bottom of the pie to get a nice balance of crispy and chewy. If you were curious, that beautiful tea kettle was designed by Sori Yanagi, and you can get one at Halcyon Tea in South Park (it’s our workhorse for tea & coffee).

The Cheeseboard usually tops their pizzas with Italian parsley, but the New Mexican pizza calls for something more complimentary to roasted chiles, and cilantro delivers.

Here’s one of the pies, fresh outta the oven. Much thinner and mild than my usual tangy sourdough, but still incredibly tasty. That bottle of Chimay Grande Reserve snuck into this meal through mere coincidence as a stocking stuffer, but rounded out our Trappist inspired Christmas feast beautifully.

The finishing table, where the pies were showered with fresh chopped cilantro, avocado oil (from Bella Vado), and kosher salt.

A big thanks to White Labs for providing the yeast for this experiment! If you brew beer at home (or wine), check them out. We’ll report back when we try a few of their liquid yeasts for more baking and homebrewing adventures in 2012.

From our family to yours… we hope you’ve had a scrumptious holiday thus far. Cheers to a tasty New Year!

Photos courtesy of Stacy Kelley.

Filed in: Beer, Berkeley, Books, California, Food, Homebrew, New Mexico, Pizza, San Diego, Sourdough Comment →

An authentic miracle

Posted by Sean on July 27, 2011

Just stumbled on this passage from Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel…

I grease another bowl with butter, flop down my glob of pale brown breathing dough into it, cover with damp dish towel and set on top of fridge, over the hot-air vent, under the ceiling. Now let it rise, double in volume, a genuine resurrection, an authentic miracle. Which was the worthier technological achievement, the moon landing or the invention of bread? The bake oven or the nuclear reactor? Only a fool would hesitate to answer.

Photo copyright Jack Dykinga

Filed in: Books, Edward Abbey, Food, Sourdough, Space, Storytelling, Technology Comment →

The Allure of California

Posted by Sean on July 26, 2011

Around 1500 AD, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo wrote Las sergas de Esplandián. The novel introduced the world to Calafia, an Amazonian warrior-queen who ruled over the fabled Isle of California, helping ignite a search for a terrestrial paradise by the legions under Hernan Cortez rule.

We were pretty fascinated by this story, and especially how a piece of literature ended up creating the place name for where we live. The story inspired the work we produced for Calafia – an estate grown organic olive oil from California.

We thought a mythical warrior-queen was the perfect inspiration for an olive oil with high aspirations that could capture the idea of California – a land where a shot at the good life has continued to draw attention across the globe for over 500 years.

It started with the myth of Calafia and her golden riches prompting conquistadors seeking immortal status in the Spanish court, continued with the America’s Manifest Destiny and the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, got into a fervor with Sutter’s Mill and the Gold Rush of the 1850s, found a new face with the golden age of Hollywood from the 1920s to 1960s, mellowing into the free spirited Summer of Love in San Francisco during 1967, and shocked the financial world during Silicon Valley’s .com boom and bust from 1995-200… (just to name a few more notable).

California holds an experience with much more depth than can be put into a few words (although Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo obviously hit a nerve). But something about this place keeps bringing people back, sometimes with violence and greed, sometimes with love and beauty, but always with great passion.

Here’s a much deeper look at the myth of Calafia from the always-addictive wikipedia.

Filed in: Books, Food, San Francisco, Storytelling Comment →