Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Blank

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.

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

The Lockheed Skunk Works, led by Kelly Johnson, was responsible for its Advanced Development Projects - everything from the P-80, the first U.S. jet fighter plane, to the U-2 and A-12 spy planes.

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.'

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

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

I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.

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

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

On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.

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

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 business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.

The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university.

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.

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

Only by moving away from the comforts of your conference room to truly engage with and listen to your customers can you learn in depth about their problems, produce features to solve those problems, and learn what drives customers to recommend, approve, and purchase products.

Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.

Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the casual, informal 'do what it takes' culture, which worked so well at less than 40 people, becomes chaotic and less effective.

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.

Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership, technological vision, frugality, and the desire to succeed.

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

In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market.

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

In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they'd found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an 'operating exec' - usually an MBA who would act as the designated 'adult' and take over the transition from Search to Build.

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.

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.

Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process.

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

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.

Companies that get started and built in New York City tend to be applied technology.

Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry.

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

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.

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.

Michael Bloomberg has yet to get his due for engineering the New York entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself.

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

Skunk works differed from advanced research groups in that they were more than just product development groups. They had direct interaction with customers and controlled a sales channel which allowed them to negotiate their own deals with customers.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction.

Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen?

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.

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

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

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.

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