Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Only by moving away from the comforts of your conference room to truly engage with and listen to your customers can you learn in depth about their problems, produce features to solve those problems, and learn what drives customers to recommend, approve, and purchase products. "

Steve Blank

Moving

Problems

You

" 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. "

" Long hours don't necessarily mean success. "

" 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. "

" It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it. "

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

" Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging. "

" The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation. "

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

" If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. "

" 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. "

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

" Startups are companies that are still in the process of searching for a business model. Ventures that are further along and executing their business models are no longer startups; they are early-stage companies. "

" 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. "

" Value Proposition Design is a 'must have' for anyone creating a new venture. It captures the core issues around understanding and finding customer problems and designing and validating potential solutions. "

" The food replacement category is what it sounds like - companies are substituting plants or food grown in a lab to replace meat, fish, eggs, milk - or, like Soylent, to package nutritionally complete meals into a drink. "

" The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segments serve your needs - both short and long term. "

" 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. "

" Most people appear to live an unexamined life, cruising through the years without much reflection about what it means, and/or taking what life hands them and believing it's all predestined. "

" History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player, or now the Net. "

" 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. "

" Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company. "

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

" You can get a good handle on a company's culture before you even get inside the building. For example, when companies say, 'We value our employees' but have reserved parking spots, a private cafeteria, and over-the-top offices for the executives, that tells you more than any PR spin. "

" Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors. "

" In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they'd found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an 'operating exec' - usually an MBA who would act as the designated 'adult' and take over the transition from Search to Build. "

Steve Blank

Past

Looking

" 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. "

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

" One can make the case that the New York venture capital industry is rooted in the 21st century, not the 20th. "

" Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market. "