Katz, J. A. (2018). The business plan: reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. In Annals of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy–2018. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Katz, J. A. (2018). The business plan: reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. In Annals of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy–2018. Edward Elgar Publishing.

In this article, which is a book chapter I think, Jerome Katz talks about how (to echo the title) reports of the business plan's death have been greatly exaggerated. He talks about how the lean startup method (Ries) does seem to have a hold in and domination of Silicon Valley. But outside of that, the business plan is still essential. 

He talks about how the business plan is essential (how you will encounter it and need to produce one) if (1) you go to school for entrepreneurship (2) try to get 3f funding (3) a SBA loan, and those are the big ones, but those account for most of the funding that gets allocated to small businesses writ large. 

Katz talks about how the reason pitch decks seem to suffice in Silicon Valley has to do with its culture; he says that their culture is so tightly linked, so densely networked that there's really no need, which doesn't really make sense. Why would a cultural difference lessen the need for due diligence?

There was one part when Katz talked about how lawyers see the pitch deck as a liability. 

Parts of this were highly useful, insofar as he talked about the history of the business plan. There was this thing called the feasibility study, which was supposed to take place after the ideational phase and before the business plan. So a lot of this area has to do with the problem of, how do we create genres that scaffold for entrepreneurial development? how do we get good ideas off of the ground and get them funded? There's quite a lot of complexity in that rhetorical situation(s), since you're dealing with PMF, the beliefs of investors and the training of computer scientists. 

Katz says this

• There are so many deals and so much competition for deals crammed into one relatively small area, that the 30–40 page business plan is too time consuming with which to deal.
• It  is  interesting  and  important  to  note  that  even  today  pitch  decks  remain  organized  along  the  lines  of  business  plans.  In  reality,  the  pitch  decks  were  always  a  part  of  the  funding  process,  as  the  summary  built  from the full plan.
• An entrepreneur  who  relies  on  a  real  or  virtual  data  room  lets  the  investor build their own model of the entrepreneur’s business, which the entrepre-neur is then forced to explain, defend or refute. In order for the entrepre-neur to control the narrative in due diligence – the vision, the model, the major details, and the data backing these – the entrepreneur needs to do a  business  plan.  
• investors there [SV] are in more frequent  and  varied  contact  with  prospective  startups  and  better  able  to  track  their  progress  in  real  time  personally  and  through  others  in  the  Valley  involved  with  the  new  firms.  In  other  places  where  contact  is  less  frequent and networks less dense, the adequacy of the pitch deck or canvas as  the  basis  for  deciding  to  invest  is  less  reasonable,  and  particularly  in  non-Internet  industries,  the  established  tradition  of  the  business  plan  is  still likely to be operating.

He talks to the guy who did the 2015 DocSend study, which is also super useful. 

This other part was interesting too. Katz says that most investment is actually of the 3f sort, and the people who have enough money to invest in startups use accountants and lawyers, and when these professionals get wind of the investment (but how? do the people call them to ask their opinion?), they ask for a BP.

The part that was most relevant to the history of the business plan was "BPs Shouldn’t be the First Document a Startup Produces." In that section he talks about how limited funding tended to crowd out the feasibility analysis, so students would just come up with an idea, assume the idea was credible, and then write a BP on it. He calls the feasibility analysis "old school."

It kind of seems like Katz is trying to historicize the lean startup method, especially when he says things like: " The point is that the idea of conducting a market-oriented feasibil-ity study in advance of doing a business plan was long considered the best practice for entrepreneurial development. " It seems like what he's doing is, this lean startup thing comes along, and people thinks it's so innovative, and such an important advance on the BP model, and Katz is like, well yea, because people didn't fund entrepreneurship programs enough. Programs wanted to collapse the whole entrepreneurial education into a single course (sounds familiar!), which has the result of crowding out the feasibility study. Katz doesn't say this, but I wonder if the lean method is good for those cash strapped programs because it can let them have their cake and eat it, so that they can get students "out of the building" (Ries) for like a week. 

Things I didn't understand were

• data room
•  the old stand-by of the screening plan (i.e., an executive summary with a full set of financials)

https://utexas.box.com/s/s70c6k4znuv20n00n0mbgrmpxh3r1klh