Quotes from Steve Blank

In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction.

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

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.

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.

At the end of the day, VCs have to provide their limited partners with great returns, or they aren't going to be able to raise another fund.

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.

Schools reward their students for a combination of intelligence, perseverance, and hard work - in the classroom and on the playing fields. But these metrics don't help kids understand that great grades are not a pass for a great life.

If you've never founded a company, rest assured it never happens as elegantly and smoothly as articles in 'Inc.' and other business magazines or case studies suggest.

Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging.

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.

While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.

The world is run by those who show up not those who wait to be asked.

Build and they will come' is not a strategy, it's a prayer.

By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools.

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.

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

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

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

It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it.

In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company.

My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way.

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.'

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.

Companies that acquire startups for their intellectual property, teams, or product lines are acquiring startups that are searching for a business model. If they acquire later stage companies who already have users/customers and/or a predictable revenue stream, they are acquiring companies that are executing.