Lean Startup, to Lean Company, to Rich Exit shares the remarkable story of Dr. Kenan Sahin, who took $1,000 in savings and used it to undertake the most extraordinary entrepreneurial journey, culminating with a $1.54 billion rich exit.

Kenan was teaching at MIT in the 1980s and sought to validate his many academic theories in a real-world lab. So he founded a startup to begin testing innovations in organizational development—challenging nearly every business best practice of the 1990s and largely transforming those practices. Among Kenan's critical insights into rich-exit business success include...

After just 17 years, Kenan's company, Kenan Systems, was acquired by Lucent Technologies and he remained the sole shareholder. Importantly to him, all of his 750+ employees also benefitted from the exit. This is the inside look at how it happened. This is a field-tested framework for building a lean startup into a lean company and then a rich exit—the perfect model for any aspiring entrepreneur.

Since Kenan also pioneered large scale commercial AI and big data systems, the framework and principles of innovation he developed are even more relevant in today's marketplace.