Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" Great founders live for chaotic moments. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Schools reward their students for a combination of intelligence, perseverance, and hard work - in the classroom and on the playing fields. But these metrics don't help kids understand that great grades are not a pass for a great life. "

" 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. "

" Normally when I have students over, we sit in the house and look at the fields to try to catch a glimpse of a bobcat hunting. "

" There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. "

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

" 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. "

" The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university. "

" Michael Bloomberg has yet to get his due for engineering the New York entrepreneurial ecosystem. "

" Skunk works were emblematic of corporate structures that focused on execution and devalued innovation. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company. "

" If you've never founded a company, rest assured it never happens as elegantly and smoothly as articles in 'Inc.' and other business magazines or case studies suggest. "

" 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. "

" The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. "

" One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times, they confuse VCs with their friends. "

" 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. "

" Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the casual, informal 'do what it takes' culture, which worked so well at less than 40 people, becomes chaotic and less effective. "

Steve Blank

You

Well

" 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. "

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