Quotes from Steve Blank

Normally when I have students over, we sit in the house and look at the fields to try to catch a glimpse of a bobcat hunting.

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

First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.

What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.

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.

Skunk works were emblematic of corporate structures that focused on execution and devalued innovation.

Everyone on the founding team ought to invest the time in a coding bootcamp.

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.

Value Proposition Design is a 'must have' for anyone creating a new venture. It captures the core issues around understanding and finding customer problems and designing and validating potential solutions.

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

Not all new ventures are at the same stage of maturity.

Startups are companies that are still in the process of searching for a business model. Ventures that are further along and executing their business models are no longer startups; they are early-stage companies.

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.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.

A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value.

Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan

We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan.

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.

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.

At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.

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