Luke Langford, COO, Vivint Wireless & Director of Strategy, Vivint. Luke’s mandate was to put an innovation process in place and identify new billion dollar business opportunities, a role he took on just after the Blackstone acquisition of Vivint closed, at the end of 2012. In 2013 he piloted Vivint’s entry into the ISP business and has been leading Vivint Wireless since. Luke has also worked at Zynga in a product management role and at Innosight – Professor Clayton Christensen’s consulting firm. He has a BA in Chemistry and an MBA, both from Harvard.

This talk should inform us about how to think about the risk of a new venture, how to categorize and prioritize and how to track and test risks. Application of these principles at Vivint Wireless along with simple tools and practices would offer entrepreneurs real and practical examples to learn from.

The talk centered around differences between risk-taking and risk-mitigation – why and how most entrepreneurs don’t pay enough attention to the differences between these two paradigms, and how risk-mitigation is key to managing Startup variables. Case studies of an online education Startup that failed and simple risk management tools used to de-risk operations at Vivint Wireless helped cement the concepts in our minds and better relate to the realities.

Presentation link: http://www.slideshare.net/Lounge47/vivint-wireless-how-to-derisk-a-new-venture-build-a-better-isp-luke-langford