Episodes

54 total
Jun 16, 2026Lean Launch Pad 2026 @ Stanford – Lessons Learned PresentationsWe just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups. The class had gotten so […]09:54Jun 9, 2026IncorruptibleIncorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries. Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix. Some will […]02:03Jun 8, 2026Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2026 – Lessons Learned PresentationsWe just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than […]15:07Apr 28, 2026Anthropic Mythos – We’ve Opened Pandora’s BoxThis article previously appeared in The Cipher Brief. For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event – the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. We braced for a one-time shock we […]07:36Apr 22, 2026AI and Teaching – The Brave New WorldThis article previously appeared in the Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era. Teams showed […]07:15Apr 9, 2026Nowhere Is SafeDrones 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 batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that […]10:52Mar 31, 2026Solving Yesterday’s Problems Will Kill YouJoin us at The 7th Annual Red Queen Conference April 22 -23 – Silicon Valley How do Portfolio Acquisition Executives and COCOMs ensure they’re working on the right problem with the right priority before locking in a requirement? Discuss, share and prototype Innovation Targeting concepts with your peers. Get hands-on with the companies and venture […]09:04Mar 17, 2026Your Startup Is Probably Dead On ArrivalYour 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, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die. I just had coffee […]09:25Feb 24, 2026Time to Move On – The Reason Relationships EndWhat Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.) […]06:58Feb 18, 2026You Only Think They Work For YouWhen I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply […]10:38Feb 10, 2026Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and ConspiraciesAnd ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32 Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened. And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives. This is one of those stories. […]07:36Feb 3, 2026Making the Wrong Things Go Faster at The Department of WarThis article previously appeared in Defense Scoop The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.) Deputy Secretary of War Steven Feinberg ran Cerebus Capital Secretary of the Army Daniel […]05:20Dec 16, 2025The Department of War DirectoryTL;DR DoW Directory revision 3 is Online here, Order a print copy here. In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the […]01:35Nov 11, 2025The Department of War Just Shot the Accountants and Opted for SpeedLast 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 performance to delivering advanced weapons at speed. Taking decades to deliver weapons is no longer an option. The DoW has joined the 21st century and adopted […]28:32Oct 30, 2025It only took 20 years, but the Strategic Management Society now Believes the Lean Startup is a StrategyI’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders […]13:04Oct 15, 2025How to Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO Directory – Now with 500 more namesThe October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.Those inside the DoW have little perspective of […]01:12Oct 13, 2025No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching OffTons 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 do they do? And more importantly, why should anyone (outside of universities) care? (Unfortunately, you won’t see answers to these questions in […]18:41Sep 17, 2025When Sh!t Hits the Fan – Founders in a CrisisGreat founders shine in a crisis. Ordinary ones watch their companies burn down. I just had coffee with two co-founders of an e-bike company who were mentoring one of our student teams. In short order I realized they were great founders – creative, agile and still having fun building their company. Unlike other e-bike rental […]04:41Sep 10, 2025How To Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO DirectoryAnnouncing the 2025 edition of the DoW PEO Directory. Online here. Think of this PEO Directory as a “Who buys in the government?” phone book. Finding a customer for your product in the Department of War is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? What is the right Go-To-Market Strategy? […]07:57Jul 8, 2025Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the FutureHow did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or die. This post tells the story of what happened when 4,000 companies faced a disruptive technology and why only one survived. In the early 20th […]13:09Jan 28, 2021Reminder00:40Jan 31, 2018Innovators podcast @ StanfordA fun interview at Stanford about some old things and new ones. https://soundcloud.com/innovatorsradio/s1e5-steve-blank-lean-startup Founders 2:15: Founders and dysfunctional families 3:55: Operating in chaos 7:18: Mentorship is a two-way street 11:50: Founders are artists 14:03: Failure=experience 17:27: Rules for raising a family if you’re a founder Startups 19:25: Startups are not smaller versions of large companies […]01:22Nov 17, 2015Lean Startup In Japanese CompaniesImplementing the Lean Startup in any company is hard. All the culture and incentives are designed for execution. Innovation at times seems like you’re swimming up hill. Now compound that level of effort with trying to put a Lean Startup culture in place in Japan. According to Takashi Tsutsumi and Masato Iino, Japanese companies tend […]00:58Jul 1, 2014How Investors Make Better Decisions: The Investment Readiness LevelInvestors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. Other than “I’ll know it when I see it”, there’s no formal way for an investor to assess project maturity or quantify risks. Other than […]11:17Dec 2, 2013When Customers Make You SmarterWe talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. Here’s what happened when an extraordinary Digital Health team gained several critical insights about their business model. The first was reducing what they thought was a five-sided market to a simpler two-sided one. But the big […]07:04Nov 25, 2013It’s Time to Play Moneyball: The Investment Readiness LevelInvestors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. We think we can do better. We now have the tools, technology and data to take incubators and accelerators to the next level. Teams can […]08:57May 6, 2013Free Reprints of “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything”The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” Available here01:03Apr 16, 2013When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Groucho Marx In my 21 years as an entrepreneur, I would come up for air once a month to religiously read the Harvard Business Review. It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me […]04:47Mar 29, 2012Nail the Customer Development Manifesto to the WallWhen Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside Pair Customer Development with Agile […]01:34Nov 24, 2010When It’s Darkest Men See the StarsWhen It’s Darkest Men See the Stars Ralph Waldo Emerson This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including […]12:34Nov 18, 2010Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better WayInsanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) and being continually surprised when it didn’t. That’s the definition of insanity. Luckily most startups now realize there is a better […]06:42Oct 25, 2010Entrepreneurship as a Science – The Business Model/Customer Development StackOver the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. Then they adopted standard microprocessors (e.g. x86, ARM.) At the same time every computer company was writing its own operating system. Soon standard operating systems (e.g. Windows, Linux) emerged. In the last decade open […]04:40Jul 22, 2010The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer ValidationStartup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. (Boy did I feel like Rip […]07:13May 17, 2010No One Wins In Business Plan CompetitionsLast 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 tool for startups. They called back laughing and the invitation disappeared. At best I think business plan competitions […]05:10Apr 15, 2010Why Accountants Don’t Run StartupsThis week I’m at the California Coastal Commission hearing in Ventura California wearing my other hat as a public official for the State of California. After the hearing I drove up to Santa Barbara to give a talk to a Lean Startup Meetup. The talk, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” summarized my current thinking about […]00:53Apr 12, 2010Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business ModelStartups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think […]06:41Apr 8, 2010No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers – Business Plans versus Business ModelsNo campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone, my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both […]05:52Apr 5, 2010Teaching Entrepreneurship – The “Survey” ClassThe Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship course at Stanford taught undergraduates how to take a technical idea and turn it into a profitable and scalable company. By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model. Students formed teams, […]06:32Mar 29, 2010Teaching Entrepreneurship – LogisticsBack from a family humanitarian trip/vacation to one of the last bastions of Communism where “marketing” isn’t even a profession and entrepreneurship is a crime. The irony is that the “Revolutionary Square” in all these Communist countries will be the the first place the McDonald’s go when the system collapses. ——————- In my last post I described my […]08:29Mar 11, 2010Teaching Entrepreneurship – By Getting Out of the BuildingOne of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship, an introduction to building a scalable startup. While the class is open to everyone at the University, we want to teach science and engineering undergraduates how they can take a technical idea and turn it into […]06:10Feb 25, 2010Customer Development for Web StartupsCustomer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. In my book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” I use enterprise software as the business model example. Ash Maurya, the CEO of WiredReach, has extended my work […]03:19Dec 17, 2009Building a Company with Customer Data – Why Metrics Are Not EnoughGathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. But what information to collect? Only 57 Questions Yesterday I got an email from an ex-student lamenting that only 2% of their selected early testers responded to their on-line survey. The survey said in part: The survey […]07:11Nov 23, 2009Customer Development: Past, Present, FutureThe Lean Startup Circle is a Google discussion group (anyone can join) centered on Customer Development/Lean Startup strategy, tactics and implementation. They were kind enough to sponsor a meet-up in San Francisco. The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries, was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture, […]00:54Nov 16, 2009Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer DevelopmentOne of the benefits of teaching is that it forces me to get smarter. I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. Dancing Around the Question Union Square Ventures was […]04:04Nov 12, 2009“Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital PitchI joined the board of Cafepress.com when it was a startup. It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of […]01:58Nov 5, 2009Raising Money Using Customer DevelopmentGetting “funded” is the holy grail for most entrepreneurs. Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. This post describes how companies using the Customer […]07:55Nov 2, 2009Lean Startups aren’t Cheap StartupsAt an entrepreneurs panel last week questions from the audience made me realize that the phrase “Lean Startup” was being confused with “Cheap Startup.” For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries’s description of the intersection of Customer Development, Agile Development and if available, open platforms and […]06:49Sep 17, 2009Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5)The first four posts of the Customer Development Manifesto described the failures of the Product Development model. This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Most […]07:00Sep 10, 2009Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4)This series of posts of the “Customer Development Manifesto” describes how the failures of the Product Development model for sales and marketing led to the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. […]06:11Sep 7, 2009The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part 3)This post is part 3 of the “Customer Development Manifesto” series and makes more sense if you read part 1 and part 2. This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.” In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development […]06:25Sep 3, 2009The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 2)This post makes more sense if you read part 1 of the Customer Development Manifesto. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model […]07:57Aug 31, 2009The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 1)This post makes more sense if you read the previous post – The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram. After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide […]10:50Feb 23, 2009Out of the Ashes – Something Isn’t Quite Right“Customer Development” was born four years earlier and 200 miles away on Sandhill Road. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who […]02:52Feb 23, 2009The Product Development ModelI realized that traditional ways to think about startups – have an idea, raise some money, do product development, go through an alpha test, beta test and first customer ship was the canonical model of how entrepreneurs thought about early stage ventures. This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. […]01:27