Top 70 Steve Blank Quotes

There’s nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.

With clear definitions and a taxonomy that illustrates their relationships, the Inventure Cycle defines the pathway from inspiration to implementation. This framework captures the skills, attitudes, and actions that are necessary to foster innovation and to bring breakthrough ideas to the world.

History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player, or now the Net.

The food replacement category is what it sounds like – companies are substituting plants or food grown in a lab to replace meat, fish, eggs, milk – or, like Soylent, to package nutritionally complete meals into a drink.

The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It’s to figure out which customer segments serve your needs – both short and long term.

The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university.

Great founders live for chaotic moments.

At the commencements I attended, graduates were classified by their academic rankings. Outstanding academic performance was noted in the programs and awarded with special honors.

The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

A startup is not just about the idea: it’s about testing and then implementing the idea. A founding team without these skills is likely dead on arrival.

The convergence of digital trends, along with the rise of China and globalization, has upended the rules for almost every business in every corner of the globe.

Each industry in a region should develop a playbook that expands and details the strategy and tactics of how to build a scalable startup.

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

Market type determines the startup’s customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending. It changes customer needs, adoption rates, product features, and positioning as well as its launch strategies, channels and activities.

Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry.

It’s worth noting that everything – from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media – were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.

Skunk works differed from advanced research groups in that they were more than just product development groups. They had direct interaction with customers and controlled a sales channel which allowed them to negotiate their own deals with customers.

Michael Bloomberg has yet to get his due for engineering the New York entrepreneurial ecosystem.

One can make the case that the New York venture capital industry is rooted in the 21st century, not the 20th.

Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.

Great VCs do everything they can to make you successful. But just like your bank, credit card company, mortgage holder, etc. they are not confused where their long-term loyalty lies.

Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup’s business model, not just the product itself.

Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors.

As an entrepreneur, my problem was that I had too many ideas.

Commencement Day has a sobering finality in that it’s the end of the prescribed path.

For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team – from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders – needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.

For busy young adults, the lure of meal substitutes is simple – it’s all about convenience – the level of effort to open a bottle or package is minimal, and the time from thinking you’re hungry to eating is almost zero.

Companies that get started and built in New York City tend to be applied technology.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to grips that the unexamined life is what works for most people. Most take what they learned in school, get a job, marry, buy a house, have a family, become a great parent, serve their god, community and country, hang with friends, and live a good life. And for them that’s great.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

Very often, if a founder is waiting around for someone else to tell him what to do, the company is near death.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup’s new product and its market.

Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder’s vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.

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.

Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses.

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching him fail from lack of nerve is tragic.

At some major events – your birth and death, for example – while you may be the center of attention, the events are managed by others and are more important to the people around you.

I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.

In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they’d found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an ‘operating exec’ – usually an MBA who would act as the designated ‘adult’ and take over the transition from Search to Build.

Describing something as the ‘Woodstock of…’ has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering.

Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership, technological vision, frugality, and the desire to succeed.

All too often, a corporate innovation initiative starts and ends with a board meeting mandate to the CEO followed by a series of memos to the staff, with lots of posters and one-day workshops. This typically creates ‘innovation theater’ but very little innovation.

Out of electronics school, my first assignment was to a fighter base in Florida. My roommate, Glen, would become my best friend in Florida and Thailand as we were sent to different air bases in Southeast Asia.

At the intersection of food science and technology, food replacement startups are creating substitutes for the basic components of meals as well as replacements for complete meals.

The Lean Startup is a process for turning ideas into commercial ventures. Its premise is that startups begin with a series of untested hypotheses. They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship – the equivalent of ‘how to run a lemonade stand.’

Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.

The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners who sell through well-established distribution channels.

Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.

Innovation in an existing company is not just the sum of great technology, key acquisitions, or smart people. Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it.

In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction.

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, family, and employees, to name a few.

The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of ‘getting out of the building’ and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies.