Steve Blank is the originator of customer development & godfather of the #leanstartup; this is his podcast.
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Security Clearances at the Speed of Startups
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Imagine you got a job offer from a company but weren’t allowed to start work – or get paid – for almost a year. And if you can’t pass a security clearance your offer is rescinded. Or you get offered an internship but can’t work on the most interesting part of the project. Sounds like a nonstarter. Well that’s the current process if you want to work…
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Why Large Organizations Struggle With Disruption, and What to Do About It
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18:51
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Seemingly overnight, disruption has allowed challengers to threaten the dominance of companies and government agencies as many of their existing systems have now been leapfrogged. How an organization reacts to this type of disruption determines whether they adapt or die.By Steve Blank
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Lean LaunchPad @Stanford 2024 – 8 Teams In, 8 Companies Out
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We just finished the 14th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions.During the quarter the eight teams spoke to 919 potential customers, beneficiaries and regulators. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a n…
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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2024 – Lessons Learned Presentations
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We just finished our 9th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford.What a year.By Steve Blank
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Gordon Bell passed on this month. I was a latecomer in Gordon Bell’s life. But he made a lasting impact on mine.By Steve Blank
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Secret History – When Kodak Went to War with Polaroid
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Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ years. Then in an inexplicable turnabout Kodak decided to destroy Polaroid’s business. To this day, every story of why Kodak went to war with Polaroid is wrong.The real reason can be found in the highly classified world of overhead reconnai…
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The Secret History of Polaroid CEO Edwin Land
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The connections between the world of national security and commercial companies still has surprises.By Steve Blank
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Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals
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One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?”This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team.It all …
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Capitalism has been good to me. After serving in the military during Vietnam, I came home and had a career in eight startups. I got to retire when I was 45. Over the last quarter century, in my third career, I helped create the methods entrepreneurs use to build new startups, while teaching 1,000’s of students how to start new ventures.…
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Apple Vision Pro – Tech in the Search of a Market
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If you haven’t been paying attention Apple has started shipping its Apple Vision Pro, its take on a headset that combines Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The product is an amazing technical tour de force. But the product/market fit of this first iteration is a swing and a miss.By Steve Blank
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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – 2023 Wrap Up
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We just wrapped up the third year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class –part of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.Joe Felter, Mike Brown and I teach the class to:Give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic competition …
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The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates
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Silicon Valley emerged from work in World War II led by Stanford professor Fred Terman developing microwave and electronics for Electronic Warfare systems. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, spurred on by Terman, Silicon Valley was selling microwave components and systems to the Defense Department, and the first fledging chip companies (Shockley, Fairchild,…
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The Department of Defense Is Getting Its Innovation Act Together – But More Can Be Done
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Despite the clear and present danger of threats from China and elsewhere, there’s no agreement on what types of adversaries we’ll face; how we’ll fight, organize, and train; and what weapons or systems we’ll need for future fights. Instead, developing a new doctrine to deal with these new issues is fraught with disagreements, differing objectives, …
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Even the Smartest VCs Sometimes Get it Wrong – Bill Gurley and Regulated Markets
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Bill Gurley was one of Silicon Valley’s smartest and most successful VCs. He recently gave a talk at the All-In Summit that was really two talks in one. The first part was railing against the consequences of regulatory capture on innovation and a second part, about the consequences of premature government regulation of AI and why the incumbents are…
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Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 2
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Laura Thomas is a former CIA operations officer. Reading how she moved in 2021 from CIA ops to a quantum technology company offered insightful career transition advice for those leaving her agency. Most of her lessons were applicable to any government employee venturing out to the private sector.By Steve Blank
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Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 1
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Laura Thomas is a former CIA operations officer. Reading how she moved in 2021 from CIA ops into a quantum technology company offered insightful career transition advice for those leaving her agency. Most of her lessons were applicable to any government employee venturing out to the private sector.This is the first of her three-part series.…
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In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opinions loosely held.” You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development.…
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Before there was Oppenheimer there was Vannevar Bush
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I just saw the movie Oppenheimer. A wonderful movie on multiple levels.But the Atomic Bomb story that starts at Los Alamos with Oppenheimer and General Grove misses the fact that from mid-1940 to mid-1942 it was Vannevar Bush (and his number 2, James Conant, the president of Harvard) who ran the U.S. atomic bomb program and laid the groundwork that…
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I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. In this case Wicked doesn’t mean morally evil, but refers to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious. (Understanding and solving homelessness, disinformation, climate change mitigation or an in…
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Reorganizing the DoD to Deter China and Win in the Ukraine – A Road Map for Congress
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Today, the U.S. is supporting a proxy war with Russia while simultaneously attempting to deter a China cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. Both are wakeup calls that victory and deterrence in modern war will be determined by a state’s ability to both use traditional weapons systems and simultaneously rapidly acquire, deploy, and integrate commercial t…
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Artificial Intelligence has been the technology right around the corner for at least 50 years. Last year a set of specific AI apps caught everyone’s attention as AI finally crossed from the era of niche applications to the delivery of transformative and useful tools – Dall-E for creating images from text prompts, Github Copilot as a pair programmin…
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Startups that Have Employees In Offices Grow 3½ Times Faster
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Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher revenue growth than those that are solely remote. Let the discussion begin. During the pandemic, companies engaged in one of the largest unintended experiments in how to organize office work – remotely, in offices, or a hybrid of the two. …
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Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stage startup failure by helping teams find product/market fit and raise initial capital. Venture Studios are an “idea factory” with their own employees searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model.…
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A CEO running a B-to-B startup in needs to live in the city where their business is – or else they’ll never scale.By Steve Blank
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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – 2022 Wrap Up
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We just wrapped up the second year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class – now part of our Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to 1) give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic …
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