Steve Blank Quotes

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

Great entrepreneurs are revolutionaries. They speak truth to power. They change the status quo. They rebel against what exists. If you want to see what country will create the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, see how they treat their dissidents.

A startup is not a smaller version of a large company.

Mentorship is a two-way street. While I was learning from them [brilliant mentors] - and their years of experience and expertise - what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking.

Startups demand comfort with chaos, uncertainty and change.

A startup is in reality a 'faith-based enterprise' on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct.

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.

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

Young entrepreneurs tend to be fearless and have no respect for the status quo, and that’s exactly what you need in an environment where the status quo is going to put you out of business.

"Build it and they will come” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer.

A founder's skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination.

The measure of a life is not time or money. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country. Your report card is whether you leave the world a better place.

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

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

Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave