Steve Blank Podcast
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Steve Blank Podcast
Steve Blank is the originator of customer development & godfather of the #leanstartup; this is his podcast.
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No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching Off
Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? H...
How To Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO Directory
How To Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO Directory by Steve Blank
Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future
How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Every disruptive technolo...
Why Investors Don’t Care About Your Business
I’ve been having coffee with lots of frustrated founders (my students and others) bemoaning most VCs won’t even meet with them unless they have AI in...
Lean Launchpad at Stanford – 2025
We just finished the 15th<>annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the wi...
Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2025 – Lessons Learned Presentations
We just finished our 10th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford.
What a year.
Hacking for Defense, now in 70 universi...
Teaching National Security Policy with AI
International Policy students will be spending their careers in an AI-enabled world. We wanted our students to be prepared for it. This is why we’ve a...
How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower
US global dominance in science was no accident, but a product of a far-seeing partnership between public and private sectors to boost innovation and e...
The Endless Frontier: U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy: Part 6a The Secret History of Silicon Valley
The U.S. has spent the last 70 years making massive investments in basic and applied research. Government funding of research started in World War II...
How the U.S. Became A Science Superpower
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 B...
An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning
A minimum viable product (MVP) is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Defining the goal for a MVP can save you tons of time, m...
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
How to get meetings with people too busy to see you
Asking, “Can I have coffee with you to pick your brain?” is probably the worst possible way to get a meeting with someone with a busy schedule. Here’...
Careers Start by Peeling Potatoes
Listening to my the family talk about dividing up the cooking chores for this Thanksgiving dinner, including who would peel the potatoes, reminded me...
Nuke’em ‘Till They Glow – Quitting My First Job
I started working when I was 14 (I lied about my age) and counting four years in the Air Force I’ve worked in 12 jobs. I left each one of them when I...
You’ll Be Dead Soon – Carpe Diem
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything...
Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves
When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies, a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” It was a bra...
Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die
We Sleep Peaceably In Our Beds At Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready To Do Violence On Our Behalf.
Everyone has events that shape t...
Balloon Wars: Part 16 of the Secret History of Silicon Valley
In 2023 China flying a “spy balloon” over the U.S. created an international incident. It turns out the U.S. did the same to the Soviet Union in the 19...
Vertical Markets 3: Reducing Risk in Startups
Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development
If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; inven...
Faith-Based versus Fact-Based Decision Making
I’ve screwed up a lot of startups on faith. One of the key tenets of entrepreneurship is that you start your company with insufficient resources and k...
Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 2
I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters” memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show. Part 1 of this post offered some s...
Founders and dysfunctional families
I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all h...
Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk
One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. “Steve,” he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical...
Vertical Markets 1: Bad Advice – All Startups are the Same
In the past entrepreneurship was viewed (and taught) as a single process, with a single approach to creating a business plan and securing funding for...
Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1
Ignore This Post
If you’re selling via the web and trade shows are something your grandfather told you about, ignore this post. If you’re in ma...
Story Behind “The Secret History” Part IV: Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location
It was 1978. Here I was, a very junior employee of ESL, a company with its hands in the heart of our Cold War strategy. Clueless about the chess game...
Story Behind “The Secret History” Part III: The Most Important Company You Never Heard Of
1978. Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first...
Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions
I love business plan competitions.
I hate business plan competitions.
Preparing for Chaos – the Life of a Startup
I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book...
Killing Innovation with Corner Cases and Consensus
I was visiting a friend whose company teaches executives how to communicate effectively. He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, S...
Change We Can Believe In – Reinventing the US Auto Industry: Open Source the Chevy Volt
This article in the NY Times about China’s thinking strategically about electric cars was a poignant contrast to our struggles in the U.S. with the au...
The “Good” Student
I saw an article in the New York Times about Google’s hiring practices that reminded me of the differences between great big successful technology com...
Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?
Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? by Steve Blank
SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot
I was lucky to have been standing in the right place when video became part of the Macintosh. And I got to experience a type of customer buying behav...
SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards
While this story is about my experience in packaging for computer retail channels, if you substitute the word “web site” for retail, you’ll get the id...