We’re thrilled to announce some excellent news. The Leader’s Guide campaign has its first corporate sponsor: Pivotal Software, a technology company for agile digital transformation. Pivotal is offering an awesome stretch goal - our first!

Here’s how it works: if the campaign hits our stretch goal target of 3000 backers, then all backers will be eligible to attend one of 11 international LG workshops. Space will be limited so the offer will be on a first come, first serve basis. We’re still working out how many spaces will be offered (and where) so if you’ve already backed the campaign, you don’t need to do anything further right now. Signups will be announced in advance and will be handled via Eventbrite or a similar platform. 

Pivotal will provide 1-day workshops to be held this fall or winter of 2015 in 11 different locations where they have offices: New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles (Santa Monica), Washington, D.C., Denver, Boulder, Seattle and Palo Alto. It’s always been a goal of our team to add geographically-diverse rewards to the campaign since we know a lot of you can’t always make it to San Francisco for events like The Lean Startup Conference, so we’re pretty psyched about this one.

Workshop content will be developed by Pivotal’s Janice and Jason Fraser, based on the The Leaders’ Guide, with input from Eric. Workshops will be led by the Frasers’ team who have undergone facilitator training, and will be thoroughly familiar with the material prepared for these events. (Members of the Lean Startup community know Janice and Jason already - they were the founders of the innovative LUXr program.) 

Pivotal will provide office supplies, beverages and snacks, and the facilitators’ time. (Participants will need to provide their own travel, accommodations, and lunches.) 

It is humbling to have such enthusiastic support from a company that has been at the forefront of agile software development since its very early days. Pivotal’s leadership has established themselves as pioneers in disciplined agile software development. Today, Pivotal Software has combined the powers of cloud-based technologies and data science with agile development practices to enable enterprises and startups to provide modern software-driven experiences. Not only have they worked with some of the great startups of our time, including Twitter and Groupon, Pivotal is also a startup success story in its own right, with an excellent track record of expansion into new segments and geographical locations. And they’ve been longtime collaborators of mine, as well--Pivotal built the original website for the testing that went into the publication of The Lean Startup.

We’re so glad to welcome them on board!

Eric