Steve Blank Quotes

Start-ups should be hunch-driven early on and data-driven as they scale.

There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business.

Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.

If opening your own business is the dream, then it must start with a Dream - not only to understand what it is that you want to do, but also, how you are going to build something better than the same chaotic environment you just left.

One of the myths you see in entrepreneurship is that people have this dream one night, wake up the next morning, and start building it. It's actually much more of an iterative process.

The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

It's important for founders to think about how they would build their company from scratch - again.

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

Generally, our first idea of what our business is going to be is not the right one. It takes a few iterations; to get there, you have to be able to let go.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

As a manager, when you can't get your first target do you go and spend on your second, third, fourth choice?

When you are just starting out with an online business, there's a good chance that you'll be making several mistakes. Because of the mistakes that can be made with starting an online business, many people decide to quit or think that online businesses are just a scam.

So many of the major decisions that affect the entire future of your enterprise happen during its first year in business. In fact, most don't make it because they don't know how to get the resources they need to survive.

Why can't modern tech companies both grow and turn a profit at the same time?

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

After serving as a U.S. Navy SEAL, I started a business. In four years, it failed incredibly, but I learned a lot about business, raising equity, and choosing partners.

By necessity, budgets require hard choices.

The goal isn't just to make transactions: it's to make better decisions in the way you run your business. If that's not at the top of every executive's priorities, then they shouldn't be an executive.

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.

Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.

One of many strengths that I often see in successful women on Wall Street is a responsible balance between risk taking and risk mitigation - the ability to assess situations smartly and make the right medium-to-long-term decisions without being lured into reckless, short-term profit-taking.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs think they need money to build the business faster when they actually haven't figured out the business equation yet.

Being a solo founder allows you to move quickly - when you're going up against massive, entrenched competitors, you need to maximize speed and agility. Having just one person at the top allows for faster decision making.