STEVE BLANK

At the intersection of food science and technology, food replacement startups are creating substitutes for the basic components of meals as well as replacements for complete meals.

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone - investors, customers, friends, family, and employees, to name a few.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry.

At the end of the day, VCs have to provide their limited partners with great returns, or they aren't going to be able to raise another fund.

Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses.

What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.

I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.

Normally when I have students over, we sit in the house and look at the fields to try to catch a glimpse of a bobcat hunting.

Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators.

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.

Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen?

Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.

At the commencements I attended, graduates were classified by their academic rankings. Outstanding academic performance was noted in the programs and awarded with special honors.

The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the casual, informal 'do what it takes' culture, which worked so well at less than 40 people, becomes chaotic and less effective.

As I've gotten older, I've come to grips that the unexamined life is what works for most people. Most take what they learned in school, get a job, marry, buy a house, have a family, become a great parent, serve their god, community and country, hang with friends, and live a good life. And for them that's great.

The convergence of digital trends, along with the rise of China and globalization, has upended the rules for almost every business in every corner of the globe.

My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way.

Schools reward their students for a combination of intelligence, perseverance, and hard work - in the classroom and on the playing fields. But these metrics don't help kids understand that great grades are not a pass for a great life.

When your product solves a problem that costs customers sleep, revenue, or profits, things are definitely looking up.

By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools.

Long hours don't necessarily mean success.

Skunk works differed from advanced research groups in that they were more than just product development groups. They had direct interaction with customers and controlled a sales channel which allowed them to negotiate their own deals with customers.

The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.