Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Blank - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times, they confuse VCs with their friends.

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.

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

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.

Long hours don't necessarily mean success.

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.

Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused.

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

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 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.

If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job.

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

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.

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.

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

Great founders live for chaotic moments.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

At the end of the day, you can decide whether you want to be an employee with a great attendance record, getting promoted to ever better titles and working on interesting projects - or whether you want to attempt to do something spectacular - this be or do should be a question you never stop asking yourself - for the next 20 years, and beyond.

Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets

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

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.

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

Disruption on the first day always looks like a toy.

You need to ask yourself, ‘Where do you want to work: startups, mid-size or large companies?’ If you find yourself debating the ‘startup versus large company’ choice you’ve already chosen the big company. Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice it’s a passion and obsession.

No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers

In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.

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

When you're gone would you rather have your gravestone say, 'He never missed a meeting.' Or one that said, 'He was a great father.'

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

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

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

There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside.

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

People talk about getting lucky breaks in their careers. I’m living proof that the “lucky breaks” theory is simply wrong. You get to make your own luck... The world is run by those who show up…not those who wait to be asked.

We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enourmous ammount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor.

Startups are painful, stressful and at times demoralizing. You need to be a true believer in the vision of what you are doing. You need to passionate about it and love what you’re doing. If you don’t, there is no way you can sustain the hours, stress and disappointment. There’s no way you’re going to be able to convince investors, customers and most importantly recruit a world-class team if you not building something you think is going to change the world.

The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.