A Quote by Steve Blank

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.
As a leader, you absolutely must expend your energy engaging your frontline employees so that they will take care of customers, who will tell stories about how great your company is to other people, who will become new customers.
If you burn out you aren't doing your customers or your investors or your employees any favors. You need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be retained for a long time. I think that's your obligation if you're good.
If you're CEO of a company, you have to be a public person. You're speaking to the press, you're speaking to investors, you're speaking to employees, you're the public face of the company and so kind of naturally you become more extroverted, more outwards facing.
You must fire bad customers just as you would fire a bad employee. If you do not get rid of your bad employees, the good employees will leave. If I do not fire bad customers, not only will my good customers leave but many of my good employees will leave as well.
Loyalty is dead, the experts proclaim, and the statistics seem to bear them out. On average, U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. We seem to face a future in which the only business relationships will be opportunistic transactions between virtual strangers.
What do you really believe makes a difference in the company? For me it's really clear. It's about customers and employees. Everything else follows. If you take care of your customers and you have motivated employees, everything else follows.
I think maybe 50 years ago people and businesses felt like they had to choose between maximizing profits and making customers happy or making employees happy, and I think we're actually living in a special time where everyone's hyperconnected, whether through Twitter or blogs and so on. Information travels so quickly that it's actually possible to have it all, to make customers happy through customer service, to make employees happy through strong company cultures, and have that actually drive growth and profits.
Dear God I've heard your name from teachers, family and friends, you made the universe and so will live on when it ends. Everyone I know admits they've never seen your face, they're not sure where you live and have no map to the place.
Creating a strong company culture isn't just good business. It's the right thing to do, and it makes your company better for all stakeholders - employees, management, and customers.
Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first.
The CEO announces that the purpose of the firm is to improve the lives of the customers and the lives of the firm's stakeholders and the quality of the planet. The company will give fair compensation to all the stakeholders and the CEO will not earn more than 20 times the median income of his employees. He will want his employees to rate him, just as he also has to rate them.
Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce's product have the faintest idea what the company does.
When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process - essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.
The decisions you make affect a lot of people. You have investors, employees, and customers who all rely on you. Being a leader is a 24-hour-a-day job.
The company has been clear from the start that we try to serve customers long-term, and long-term investors are going to be more excited about Amazon than short-term investors.
The act of founding a company is its own act of narcissism: 'I alone can do this.'
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