Steve Blank Podcast
Steve Blank, eight-time entrepreneur and now a business school professor at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, shares his hard-won wisdom as he pioneers entrepreneurship as a management science, combining Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development. The conclusion? Startups are simply not small versions of large companies! Startups are actually temporary organizations designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.
- Update frequency
- every 9 days
- Average duration
- 10 minutes
- Episodes
- 295
- Years Active
- 2012 - 2025
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 knowledge.
00:02:38 |
Fri 14 Mar 2025
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 suggestions on going to trade shows to generate aw…
00:09:48 |
Wed 12 Mar 2025
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 her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of p…
00:09:51 |
Sun 09 Mar 2025
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 markets. Our firm has a portfolio of companies a…
00:03:36 |
Sat 08 Mar 2025
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 a startup. The best entrepreneurship textbooks a…
00:04:44 |
Thu 06 Mar 2025
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 markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, commu…
00:10:15 |
Wed 05 Mar 2025
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 being played in Washington, I was just a minion i…
00:12:45 |
Sun 02 Mar 2025
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 company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is …
00:11:12 |
Thu 27 Feb 2025
Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions
I love business plan competitions.
I hate business plan competitions.
00:04:07 |
Tue 25 Feb 2025
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 may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” wh…
00:02:13 |
Mon 24 Feb 2025
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, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers c…
00:04:03 |
Fri 21 Feb 2025
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 auto bailout. It reminded me about the adage, “whe…
00:03:53 |
Thu 20 Feb 2025
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 companies and small scrappy startups.
00:02:17 |
Tue 18 Feb 2025
Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?
Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? by Steve Blank
00:03:39 |
Mon 17 Feb 2025
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 behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect…
00:09:32 |
Fri 14 Feb 2025
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 idea why these lessons were timeless for me.
00:07:44 |
Thu 13 Feb 2025
Supermac War Story 8: Cats and Dogs – Admitting a Mistake
At SuperMac, I thought I was good VP of marketing; aggressive, relentless and would take no prisoners – even with my peers inside the company. But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a di…
00:03:42 |
Wed 12 Feb 2025
SuperMac War Story 7: Rabbits Out of the Hat – Product Line Extensions
A year after we started repositioning the company, Engineering, which had been working on a family of new products literally for years, came to deliver some good news and bad news.
00:09:29 |
Mon 10 Feb 2025
SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical Execution — the Potrero Benchmarks
SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical Execution — the Potrero Benchmarks by Steve Blank
00:11:34 |
Sun 09 Feb 2025
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