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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators. "

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

" Very often, if a founder is waiting around for someone else to tell him what to do, the company is near death. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The convergence of digital trends, along with the rise of China and globalization, has upended the rules for almost every business in every corner of the globe. "

" I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day. "

" The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners who sell through well-established distribution channels. "

" We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan. "

" Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership, technological vision, frugality, and the desire to succeed. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

" While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process. "

" 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. "

" 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. "