Steve Blank Podcast show

Steve Blank Podcast

Summary: Steve Blank, eight-time entrepreneur and now a business school professor at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, shares his hard-won wisdom as he pioneers entrepreneurship as a management science, combining Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development. The conclusion? Startups are simply not small versions of large companies! Startups are actually temporary organizations designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.

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  • Artist: Steve Blank
  • Copyright: Copyright 2010 by Albedrio Partners, Inc.

Podcasts:

 Is a $100 Million Enough? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:03:24

Capitalism has been good to me. After serving in the military during Vietnam, I came home and had a career in eight startups. I got to retire when I was 45. Over the last quarter century, in my third career, I helped create the methods entrepreneurs use to build new startups, while teaching 1,000’s of students how to start new ventures.

 Apple Vision Pro – Tech in the Search of a Market | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:07:43

If you haven’t been paying attention Apple has started shipping its Apple Vision Pro, its take on a headset that combines Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The product is an amazing technical tour de force. But the product/market fit of this first iteration is a swing and a miss.

 Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – 2023 Wrap Up | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:11:34

We just wrapped up the third year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class –part of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Joe Felter, Mike Brown and I teach the class to: Give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China, Russia and other rivals. Offer insights on how commercial technology (AI, autonomy, cyber, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, biotech, hypersonics, and others) are radically changing how we will compete across all the elements of national power e.g. diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement (our influence and footprint on the world stage). Expose students to experiential learning on policy questions. Students formed teams, got out of the classroom and talked to the stakeholders and developed policy recommendations.

 The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:28:48

Silicon Valley emerged from work in World War II led by Stanford professor Fred Terman developing microwave and electronics for Electronic Warfare systems. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, spurred on by Terman, Silicon Valley was selling microwave components and systems to the Defense Department, and the first fledging chip companies (Shockley, Fairchild, National, Rheem, Signetics…) were in their infancy. But there were no computer companies. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have a computer company until 1966 when Hewlett Packard shipped the HP 2116 minicomputer.

 The Department of Defense Is Getting Its Innovation Act Together – But More Can Be Done | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:08:26

Despite the clear and present danger of threats from China and elsewhere, there’s no agreement on what types of adversaries we’ll face; how we’ll fight, organize, and train; and what weapons or systems we’ll need for future fights. Instead, developing a new doctrine to deal with these new issues is fraught with disagreements, differing objectives, and incumbents who defend the status quo. Yet change in military doctrine is coming. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks is navigating the tightrope of competing interests to make it happen – hopefully in time.

 Even the Smartest VCs Sometimes Get it Wrong – Bill Gurley and Regulated Markets | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:16:44

Bill Gurley was one of Silicon Valley’s smartest and most successful VCs. He recently gave a talk at the All-In Summit that was really two talks in one. The first part was railing against the consequences of regulatory capture on innovation and a second part, about the consequences of premature government regulation of AI and why the incumbents are all for it. He illustrated his talk with regulatory horror stories in the telecom market, electronic health records, and Covid antigen tests.

 Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 2 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:14:20

Laura Thomas is a former CIA operations officer. Reading how she moved in 2021 from CIA ops to a quantum technology company offered insightful career transition advice for those leaving her agency. Most of her lessons were applicable to any government employee venturing out to the private sector.

 Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 1 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:11:55

Laura Thomas is a former CIA operations officer. Reading how she moved in 2021 from CIA ops into a quantum technology company offered insightful career transition advice for those leaving her agency. Most of her lessons were applicable to any government employee venturing out to the private sector. This is the first of her three-part series.

 Profound Beliefs | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:08:16

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opinions loosely held.” You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development.

 Before there was Oppenheimer there was Vannevar Bush | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:17:55

I just saw the movie Oppenheimer. A wonderful movie on multiple levels. But the Atomic Bomb story that starts at Los Alamos with Oppenheimer and General Grove misses the fact that from mid-1940 to mid-1942 it was Vannevar Bush (and his number 2, James Conant, the president of Harvard) who ran the U.S. atomic bomb program and laid the groundwork that made the Manhattan Project possible. Here’s the story.

 Lean Meets Wicked Problems | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:11:09

I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. In this case Wicked doesn’t mean morally evil, but refers to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious. (Understanding and solving homelessness, disinformation, climate change mitigation or an insurgency are examples of wicked problems. Companies also face Wicked problems. In contrast, designing AI-driven enterprise software or building dating apps are comparatively simple problems.)

 Reorganizing the DoD to Deter China and Win in the Ukraine – A Road Map for Congress | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:08:40

Today, the U.S. is supporting a proxy war with Russia while simultaneously attempting to deter a China cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. Both are wakeup calls that victory and deterrence in modern war will be determined by a state’s ability to both use traditional weapons systems and simultaneously rapidly acquire, deploy, and integrate commercial technologies (drones, satellites, targeting software, et al) into operations at every level.

 Playing With Fire – ChatGPT | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:11:26

Artificial Intelligence has been the technology right around the corner for at least 50 years. Last year a set of specific AI apps caught everyone’s attention as AI finally crossed from the era of niche applications to the delivery of transformative and useful tools – Dall-E for creating images from text prompts, Github Copilot as a pair programming assistant, AlphaFold to calculate the shape of proteins, and ChatGPT 3.5 as an intelligent chatbot. These applications were seen as the beginning of what most assumed would be domain-specific tools. Most people (including me) believed that the next versions of these and other AI applications and tools would be incremental improvements. We were very, very wrong.

 Startups that Have Employees In Offices Grow 3½ Times Faster | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:06:53

Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher revenue growth than those that are solely remote. Let the discussion begin. During the pandemic, companies engaged in one of the largest unintended experiments in how to organize office work – remotely, in offices, or a hybrid of the two. Post-pandemic, startups are still struggling to manage the best way to manage return-to-office issues – i.e. employee’s expectations of continuing to work remotely versus the best path to build and grow a profitable company.

 Is a Venture Studio Right for You? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 00:11:16

Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stage startup failure by helping teams find product/market fit and raise initial capital. Venture Studios are an “idea factory” with their own employees searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. They do the most to de-risk the early stages of a startup.

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