At the office, it’s sometimes easier to talk about getting things done than actually doing them. But if you operate that way as a startup, your company could be dead before you ever make a product. 

At GV — the venture capital division of Alphabet (formerly known as Google) — they’re perfecting away to get ideas off the ground quickly and help out the companies in their portfolio: companies like Nest, Slack and Uber.

The method is called a “sprint.” It was borrowed from the software engineering world and expanded for Google’s own product development. Sprints are five-day challenges with a specific agenda: to rapidly test an idea in the real world.

Jake Knapp is with GV, a former designer at Google and the creator of Google Hangouts. He writes about how how to use the sprint method at any company in his book, “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.”

Click the audio player above to hear our conversation with Knapp