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All Quotes by author - Steve Blank

" All too often, a corporate innovation initiative starts and ends with a board meeting mandate to the CEO followed by a series of memos to the staff, with lots of posters and one-day workshops. This typically creates 'innovation theater' but very little innovation. "

" Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model. "

" As an entrepreneur, my problem was that I had too many ideas. "

" 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. "

" A startup is not just about the idea: it's about testing and then implementing the idea. A founding team without these skills is likely dead on arrival. "

" At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War. "

" At some major events - your birth and death, for example - while you may be the center of attention, the events are managed by others and are more important to the people around you. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Commencement Day has a sobering finality in that it's the end of the prescribed path. "

" Companies that acquire startups for their intellectual property, teams, or product lines are acquiring startups that are searching for a business model. If they acquire later stage companies who already have users/customers and/or a predictable revenue stream, they are acquiring companies that are executing. "

" Companies that get started and built in New York City tend to be applied technology. "

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

" Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential. "

" Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis. "

" Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident. "

" Describing something as the 'Woodstock of...' has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering. "

" Each industry in a region should develop a playbook that expands and details the strategy and tactics of how to build a scalable startup. "

" Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship - the equivalent of 'how to run a lemonade stand.' "

" Everyone on the founding team ought to invest the time in a coding bootcamp. "

" Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself. "

" Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process. "

" First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them. "

" For busy young adults, the lure of meal substitutes is simple - it's all about convenience - the level of effort to open a bottle or package is minimal, and the time from thinking you're hungry to eating is almost zero. "

" For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core. "

" Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan. "

" Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. "

" 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. "

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