For the last two decades in his classroom at Brown University, Danny Warshay (MBA 1994) has been using a structured approach to teach entrepreneurship—what he calls “see, solve, scale.” But roles reversed when his students pointed out that the executive director of Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship was not scaling the foundational teaching upon which the center was built. With his new book, See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success, Warshay is bringing his process to a much broader audience, particularly to those who don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs.

“There’s a misunderstanding that you have to be from a certain place, to look a certain way, to have a certain type of background training, to have one type of personality—all these misconceptions about what the prototypical classic entrepreneur should be,” Warshay says. “I’m not hesitant to use the words discriminated against. When only 2.3 percent of venture-backed founders are women, when only 1.5 percent are LatinX, when only 1 percent are Black founders—clearly there’s neglect, ignoring, and discrimination involved. So let’s be honest with each other about it, and then go solve that problem.”

Where, in your experience, do most entrepreneurs fail?

They don’t use a process and are haphazard about entrepreneurship, thinking if they have “entrepreneurial spirit” they can be successful. When I was invited to teach entrepreneurship at Brown, my faculty appointment was in the engineering school. And I said to the dean, “It can’t be that I’m supposed to teach a spirit. Imagine if we taught the engineers in charge of building our bridges to rely on a similar bridge-building spirit.” That would be insane, and no one would trust us to teach anything else. In bridge building, there are fundamental principles that follow a step-by-step process which can be taught and learned. And there’s lots of variation in bridges, from one to the next. So I devised a similar process for entrepreneurship: see, solve, scale. It starts with identifying and validating an unmet need. This is often the biggest weakness in entrepreneurship. Many people, especially tech people, lead with a solution in search of a problem.

I also often see entrepreneurs leap from the see stage to the scale stage. They layer lots of resources on the first solution and roll it out. This is a three-step process, and you can’t skip the second step. Solve is an iterative process. You will not get it right the first time. So iterate, test hypotheses, invest small amounts of resources at first, and make incremental progress to the point where you can justify investing significant resources.

In the book, you try to replicate some of the interaction of a classroom with QR codes, which link to videos, for example, and a private LinkedIn community. Can you talk about those interactive elements, and why it was important to include them?

Before this book, I had never published anything, so I benefited from my own scarce resources. I didn’t know how the book was supposed to be structured, but I did know I wanted the readers to become engaged in the process. I didn’t think QR codes were so revolutionary, but my editor said it was the first time he’d ever seen that. So readers have the ability to engage with other resources that are also valuable. And I wanted to make this interactive experience not only between me and the reader. My intention is for somebody to read the book and then engage with me and a community of learners. I’m thrilled to see that people are already posting and sharing with each other, in authentic and meaningful ways. This is scale that is not all about me.

You cite your time at HBS and specific professors who helped shape your work. How has your vantage changed from mentee to peer?

All my Brown courses follow an HBS format. We use HBS cases. I cold-call and use the Socratic method in class. I’m not sure I could be a teacher at all without having learned from that point of view. It is a challenging way of teaching, you know. When I first went to Egypt to teach a group of executives, one said to me, “Wow, this case-study approach is nothing that I’ve experienced before, and I really like it. It’s like jazz. We’re used to having a teacher behave like a classical conductor. They present the material just as it’s written, and they want us to play it back to them. But in your case, you’re like the head of the jazz ensemble; while you clearly have a good sense of what you’d like to cover, you want us to improvise.” And I thought that is such a wonderful, poetic, effective way of describing what I experienced at Harvard Business School.

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