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" The Lockheed Skunk Works, led by Kelly Johnson, was responsible for its Advanced Development Projects - everything from the P-80, the first U.S. jet fighter plane, to the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. "

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" 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

" Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen? "

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

" 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. "

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

" Not all new ventures are at the same stage of maturity. "

" In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction. "

" 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. "

" 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 are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally. "

Steve Blank

American

Football

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

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

" Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "