Steve Blank’s SLL Keynote – It’s a “Must Watch”

April 26, 2010


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Some of my favorite quote are:

Role of the Entrepreneur

  • Your job as an entrepreneur in a startup is to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. When you find it, your job is to build a company around that business model.
  • Search for a business model rather than write a business plan. Biz model is how a company makes money.
  • Customer and agile development is how you search for a business model.
  • You fail if you stay a startup – goal is to become a large company.  Search is bringing order out of chaos, pivoting all the time.
  • Goal is not to becoming the world’s most fun startup. Goal is to become a valuable company.
  • No business plan survives first contact with the customer.

Differences Between Startups and Established Companies

  • Startups search and pivot; companies execute.
  • Very different skills needed to execute a business model compared to those needed to search for a business model.
  • Customer development = hypothesis testing, minimum feature sets and pivoting.  Product management is very different than customer development.
  • You need to brainwash and deprogram product managers if you want them to perform customer development.
  • Key startup numbers are not: balance sheet, income statements and cashflow.  They are cash, viral coefficient, customer acquisition cost, burn rate, average transaction size…

Want more Steve?  Check out his blog.

3 thoughts on “Steve Blank’s SLL Keynote – It’s a “Must Watch””

  1. This was definitely a great talk. It’s funny, while watching this — all I could think about is Digg.com since Kevin Rose (founder) has come back to run the company again. Does this mean that they’re still in search. For such a large company (traffic-wise), are they only making their money on ads?

  2. I sent my comment in before finishing the video. Steve definitely encapsulates exactly why I’ve gone into “scalable startups” and am becoming an entrepreneur in the making for the future. I just love that search. I really wish the business school I went to had a much more in-depth look into entrepreneurship because there’s so much to learn.

    Definitely forwarding this video to the colleagues I’m still connected at the Entrepreneurship Program at the UW Business School. Thanks again for sharing.

  3. Wow! What a great guy for sharing this information and taking on that mission to bring the needed education to entrepreneurs.