Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator who is changing how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is being taught. He created the Customer Development methodology that launched the lean startup movement, and wrote about the process in his first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. His second book, The Startup Owner's Manual, is a step-by-step guide to building a successful company. Blank teaches the Customer Development methodology in his Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia University and the National Science Foundation. He blogs about entrepreneurship at http://www.steveblank.com

Posts by Steve Blank

Wednesday, 20th June 2012

[Book Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

Editor's note: This is the second in a two-part excerpt from the book The Startup Owner’s Manual, a step-by-step how-to guide for entrepreneurs. In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, "Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination?"). Customer discovery…

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Thursday, 7th June 2012

[Excerpt] Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination?

Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part excerpt from the book The Startup Owner’s Manual, a step-by-step, how-to guide for entrepreneurs. In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy. A startup begins with the vision of its founders: a vision of a new product or service that solves a…

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Wednesday, 29th February 2012

Art of Entrepreneurship

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why. I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, "following your customer development stuff is making my company…

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Friday, 6th January 2012

Why the Movie Industry Cant Innovate

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (a third of it in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD…

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Thursday, 13th October 2011

The Helsinki Spring

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University…

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Monday, 19th September 2011

The Pay-It-Forward Culture: Silicon Valley's Practical Generosity

Foreign visitors to Silicon Valley continually mention how willing we are to help, network and connect strangers. We take it so for granted we never even to bother to talk about it. It's the "Pay-It-Forward" culture. We're All in This Together - The Chips are Down In 1962 Walker's Wagon Wheel Bar/Restaurant in Mountain View became the lunch…

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Wednesday, 31st August 2011

The Direction of Success: The Startup Genome Compass

What makes startups succeed or fail? More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near-death experiences along the way. Simply put, while we now have some good theory, we just are not very good at creating startups yet. After 50…

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Monday, 1st August 2011

Eureka! National Science Foundation's I-Corps Trains a New Generation of Scientists in Business

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn't pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated…

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Thursday, 21st July 2011

The $10 Million Photo and Other VC Stories

When we were trying to raise money for E.piphany, my last startup, I was negotiating with a venture capital firm called Infinity Capital. They really wanted to invest, but it was the beginning of the bubble, and I wanted (what was then) an absurd valuation. All we had were six slides, and I wanted a $10 million post-money valuation. But it was my…

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Tuesday, 14th June 2011

Reinventing the Startup Board Meeting: Part 2

Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development"; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas. Yet even with all these tools, early…

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