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The Next Bubble - Don't Get Fooled Again
My friend, Ben Horowitz, and I debate the tech bubble in The Economist. This post originally appeared as part 1 of 3 ———————————…
Steve Blank
Steve Blank, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Stanford, I-Corps, H4D Hacking for Defense
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Visit steveblank.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Apr 2009 – Oct 2026
Tech Industry & Business 76Startups 56Life, Learning & Writing 11Career & Management 11Society, Policy & Culture 9History & Retro Computing 4
32
No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions
Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution t…
33
Fear of Failure and Lack of Speed in a Large Corporation
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
34
Killing Your Startup By Listening to Customers
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. Five…
35
Is a venture studio right for you?
This post previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stag…
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Pre-seed, seed startups with employees in office have higher revenue growth
This article previously appeared in EIX – Entreprenuers and Innovators Exchange. Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher…
37
VCs Are Not Your Friends
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times they confuse VC’s with their friends. Lets Go to Lunch At Rocket Scienc…
38
Bonfire of the Vanities
When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire. — Over thirty years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop compu…
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No Accounting for Startups
Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups u…
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Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Ag…
41
Ejection Seats
I pulled a few pranks in the military, but the one that got pulled on me took years off of my life. Alone in the Cockpit There isn’t anything cooler for a 19-year old then getting into the cockpit …
42
Hubris Versus Humility: The $15 billion Difference
Describing your product as “new and “never been done before” instead of “we’re just like those others guys, but better” could cost your company billions. RIM and TiVo are two examples of getting i…
43
Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPOs, and VCs)
If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collap…
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Strategy is Not a To Do List
I had breakfast with two of my ex-students from Singapore who were building a really interesting startup. They were deep into Customer Discovery and presented a ton of customer data on the validity…
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Why Lawyers Don’t Run Startups
Startups need to have a great lawyer, accountant, patent attorney, etc. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers I was having coff…
46
Someone Stole My Startup Idea – Part 1: Are Those My Initials?
In my 21 years of startups I’ve had my ideas “stolen” twice. Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t. Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not ju…
47
Closure. "I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design."
For those that know me, I’m kind of a “life is too short” kind of guy. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back. However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was rem…
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It Must Be A Marketing Problem
The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model, reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is call…
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You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research…
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The End of Innocence
Remember when the days were long And rolled beneath a deep blue sky Didn’t have a care in the world With mommy and daddy standin’ by But “happily ever after” fails The End o…
51
Supercomputer Porn - Letting your competitors do your market research for you
As VP of Marketing at our new startup, the CEO literally threw me out of the building and told me not to return until I understood the market and could identify the key applications and customers f…
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Ask and It Shall be Given
Once I recovered from burnout at Zilog, I was working less and accomplishing more. I even had time to find a girlfriend who was a contractor to the company. One of her first comments was, “I…
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Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves
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 …
54
Steve Blank: Selling with Sports Scores
When I was a young marketer I learned how to listen to customers by making a fool of myself. Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field …
55
Steve Blank If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote…
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Steve Blank What’s A Startup? First Principles.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…