Steve Blank

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing...

Faced with disruptive innovation, you can be sure any possibility for innovation dies when a company forms a committee for an "overarching strategy."

I was reminded how innovation dies when the email below arrived in my inbox. It was well written, thoughtful and had a clearly articulated sense of purpose....

The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human social needs and figure out how to mediate them online.

(Look at the first wave of the web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora,...

We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try...

We ran the first National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class October to December 2011.

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology.

When Bob Dorf and I wrote The Startup Owner's Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:

A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search
for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model

1. There Are No Facts Inside...

Yesterday, the second half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the final four (the first five are here.)

Team ParkPoint Capital
This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that...

Yesterday, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the first five.

It Feels Like 20 Years Ago Today
It's hard to believe it's only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams...

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution.

When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Here's...

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.

Five Cups of Coffee
I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got...

Alexander Osterwalder and I spent last week in Salt Lake City, Utah as judges at the 2nd Annual International Business Model Competition, hosted by Professor Nathan Furr, and his team at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship.

The idea of a Business Model...

While entrepreneurship is in the news fairly regularly, I seldom make news myself. Today, however there are two important updates for entrepreneurs everywhere. Let me be brief...

The "Startup Owner's Manual" goes On Press Tuesday 2/14
Two years in the making and literally ten years in development, I'm proud...

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 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...

The Lean LaunchPad class for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps is a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. Syllabus here.

The 21 NSF teams had been out of...

Over the last two months, the U.S. government has been running one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. This week we saw the results.

63 scientists and engineers in 21...

Over the last 40 years Technology investors have learned that the success of startups are not just about the technology but "it's about the team."

We spent a year screwing it up in our Lean...

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving...

"When it's darkest men see the stars" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This Thanksgiving season, it might seem there's less to be thankful for. One out of 11 of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous...

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain

Venture Capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year....

Read Part 1 of this post for background.

Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Other manufacturers had...