Steve Blank Quotes

A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.

Money is the lifeblood of startups. You stay in business until you run out of it.

Building your product is easy. The hard part is getting customers.

The #1 change in Silicon Valley is information density. If you think about it, 30 years ago the only way you got info was during one-on-one meetings. You knew very little and the world knew very little. We just know a lot more now.

Customers don't ask to see your business plan.

In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced.

No business plan survives its first contact with customers.

Don't believe your own b.s. It's real easy to confuse funding with success.

The Silicon Valley culture is "I can win and you can win" - it isn't a sum-zero game.

Don’t execute other peoples advice if you can’t explain why you’re doing it.

When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency.

Customer Development says “Glad you have these hypotheses about your startup. All of them are probably wrong.”

Only because earlyvangelists are buying into your total vision will they spend money for an incomplete, buggy, barely functions first product.

Change happens only when you could educate and inspire others. When you could use facts to create faith in what's possible... The easy part will be to write papers for your peers... The harder part, and the one you should think about, is how are you going to explain inconvenient truths to people who may not want to hear them. How are you going to rouse an audience to action?

You don't need to be the smartest person to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but figuring out how to move your agenda forward.