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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Steve Blank

Family

Life

Community

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick. "

" Describing something as the 'Woodstock of...' has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering. "

" Companies that get started and built in New York City tend to be applied technology. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA. "

" 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. "

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

" All too often, a corporate innovation initiative starts and ends with a board meeting mandate to the CEO followed by a series of memos to the staff, with lots of posters and one-day workshops. This typically creates 'innovation theater' but very little innovation. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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