Steve Blank, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Stanford, I-Corps, H4D Hacking for Defense
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Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What d…
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one o…
Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble. —– We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato fa…
I know a change is going to come If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing R…
I’ve been in London for the last month and have heard policymakers react to the wake up call Elon Musk just delivered. The decision of the U.S. to shut off intelligence and throttle the military v…
A version of this article appeared in War on the Rocks. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The coun…
Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ…
It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether t…
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review Reading the NY Times article “Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture,” I realized it was time for …
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I …
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
Last week the Department of War finally killed the last vestiges of Robert McNamara’s 1962 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). The DoW has pivoted from optimizing cost and performa…
This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From source…
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be…
At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mo…
Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batterie…
If you’ve had a great career what happens to all your knowledge and experience when you retire?Great Suit My wife and I had dinner last night with a friend of hers from high school. Tom, her husban…
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra…
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code wr…
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t…
For the next few months I’ll be posting a series of posts on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make my dent in the universe and trying …
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energi…
I don’t own an Apple Watch. I do have a Fitbit. But the Apple Watch 4 announcement intrigued me in a way no other product has since the original IPhone. This wasn’t just another product announcemen…
At times VC’s forget who their business is built on. Nice Car Last week in a car showroom of all places I ran into a VC who I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had sat on the board of my last company an…
Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruitin…
Artificial Intelligence is a once-in-a lifetime commercial and defense game changer (download a PDF of this article here) Hundreds of billions in public and private capital is being invested in Art…
In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. As a reminder, this post is not legal advice, it’s not even advice.…
And, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of Heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. Wil…