Quotes from Steve Blank

You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria, and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin.

When your product solves a problem that costs customers sleep, revenue, or profits, things are definitely looking up.

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 Value Proposition Canvas functions like a plug-in to the Business Model Canvas and zooms into the value proposition and customer segment to describe the interactions between customers and product more explicitly and in more detail.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

Great founders live for chaotic moments.

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.

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.

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

Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.

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.

Most people appear to live an unexamined life, cruising through the years without much reflection about what it means, and/or taking what life hands them and believing it's all predestined.

Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators.

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.

Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan.

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.

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.

Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.

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