Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Will
She
Sell
Related Quotes:
" At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War. "
Steve Blank
Force
Vietnam War
War
" Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business. "
Steve Blank
Understanding
Business
Sense
" Great VCs do everything they can to make you successful. But just like your bank, credit card company, mortgage holder, etc. they are not confused where their long-term loyalty lies. "
Steve Blank
Loyalty
Successful
Great
" Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. "
Steve Blank
Customers
Need
Know
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Own
Company
Key
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Creating
Food
Science
" If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. "
Steve Blank
Sales
CEO
Job
" In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company. "
Steve Blank
Leave
Known
Failure
" Very often, if a founder is waiting around for someone else to tell him what to do, the company is near death. "
Steve Blank
Someone
Waiting
Tell
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Without
Dead
Testing
" Long hours don't necessarily mean success. "
Steve Blank
Hours
Success
Mean
" Each industry in a region should develop a playbook that expands and details the strategy and tactics of how to build a scalable startup. "
Steve Blank
Strategy
Industry
How
" The Lean Startup is a process for turning ideas into commercial ventures. Its premise is that startups begin with a series of untested hypotheses. They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers. "
Steve Blank
Ideas
Building
Succeed
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Own
Sales
Development
" With clear definitions and a taxonomy that illustrates their relationships, the Inventure Cycle defines the pathway from inspiration to implementation. This framework captures the skills, attitudes, and actions that are necessary to foster innovation and to bring breakthrough ideas to the world. "
Steve Blank
Ideas
World
Relationships
" It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies. "
Steve Blank
Media
Worth
Social Media
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Test
Vision
Company
" Out of electronics school, my first assignment was to a fighter base in Florida. My roommate, Glen, would become my best friend in Florida and Thailand as we were sent to different air bases in Southeast Asia. "
Steve Blank
Best
Friend
Best Friend
" Great founders live for chaotic moments. "
Steve Blank
Moments
Live
Chaotic
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Why
Art
Building
" Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process. "
Steve Blank
Normal
Happen
Failure
" Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors. "
Steve Blank
Understand
Own
Need
" Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies. "
Steve Blank
Work
Working
Hard
" Innovation in an existing company is not just the sum of great technology, key acquisitions, or smart people. Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it. "
Steve Blank
Innovation
Technology
Great
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Technology
Business
End
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Time
Busy
Effort
" Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself. "
Steve Blank
Business
Product
Feedback
" Skunk works were emblematic of corporate structures that focused on execution and devalued innovation. "
Steve Blank
Skunk
Innovation
Focused
" 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.' "
Steve Blank
Education
Stand
Small
" 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. "
Steve Blank
Face
Family
Employees