Steve Blank

Steve Blank
Born	1953 Lower East Side, New York
Occupation	Author and Entrepreneur
Known for	The Customer Development Methodology

Steve Blank (born 1953) is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician who is based in Pescadero, California.^[1]

Blank is recognized for developing the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement.^[2] Blank is also the co-founder of E.piphany.^[3][4]

Blank has spent over thirty years within the high technology industry. He has founded or worked within eight startup companies, four of which have gone public.^[3][5]

Blank's Google Tech talk, The Secret History of Silicon Valley, offers a widely regarded insider's perspective on the emerging Silicon Valley's start-up innovation. Blank has published three books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost and The Startup Owner's Manual.^[6][7]

Blank teaches and writes about Customer Development and is a consulting associate professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford.^[8][9] He currently lectures at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Together with the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), he created a version of Lean Launchpad for Life Sciences and Healthcare which he taught there in the fall 2013.

Early life

Blank was born to immigrant parents who ran a grocery in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City.^[10] He grew up with a sister who was 12 years older than him and both siblings were raised by his mother after his father left home when he was aged 6.^[10] His mother and father had never been to college and wished for their son to graduate.^[11] He attended the University of Michigan, but disliked being in school and dropped out after one semester.^[10][11][12]

Blank hitchhiked to Miami, where he found work at the Miami International Airport, loading racehorses onto aircraft.^[10][11] At the airport, Blank developed an interest in avionics, which he nurtured until the early 1970s when he joined the Air Force.^[11]

His military career took him to Thailand during the Vietnam War, where he was managing a team of 15 electronics technicians within a year and a half.^[10][11] He was 20 years old.^[11]

Blank left the military and moved to Palo Alto, a town in an area which would ultimately become known as Silicon Valley.^[11]

Career

Steve Blank arrived in Silicon Valley at the start of the business boom in 1978.^[3][7] His first job within the region was with ESL, a startup that was a primary US intelligence company for National Means of Technical Verification.^[12] The company helped the government understand the Soviets' technological and arms developments during the Cold War.^[12]

During his 34-year career, Blank founded or worked with a wide range of high-tech companies.^[13] Four of his companies went public.^[10] Some of his ventures include Zilog and MIPS Computers, Convergent Technologies, Ardent, SuperMac Technologies, ESL and Rocket Science Games.^[8][13]

Blank has since served on the boards of the public entities Macrovision/Rovi and Immersion as well as several private companies. He continues to invest in and advise Silicon Valley startups such as Udacity^[10] and Votizen.^[1]

E.Piphany

Blank co-founded his 8th and last startup, the Customer Relationship Management provider E.piphany, in 1996 and retired the day before its IPO in September 1999. In 2005, E.piphany was acquired by SSA Global Technologies for $329 million.^{[3][14][15][16]}

The software package was designed to scrape customer information from databases and deposit the data into a web browser.^[17]

Notable members of the company include Roger Siboni and Karen Richardson.^[17][18]

Customer Development Methodology

Blank created the Customer Development methodology in the mid 1990s.^[12] The concept details a scientific approach that can be applied by startups and entrepreneurs to improve their products success by developing a better understanding of their consumers.^[2][3][12] Primary to the concept is a balanced relationship between developing a product and understanding the customer.^[19]

Lean Startup Movement

Blank's Customer Development methodology is a cornerstone of the Lean Startup Movement, popularized by Eric Ries^[20][21] whom Blank states was “the best student I ever had.”^[3]The Lean Startup approach relies on validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback.^[22] It has attracted attention among entrepreneurs world-wide as a constructive way to try out ideas and gain customers.^[14] Ries has integrated the Customer Development methodology into the Lean Startup practices and considers it to be one of the Lean Startup Movement's pillars.^[19][23][24]

Blank's academic teaching largely focuses on the Customer Development methodology and the application of scientific methodologies to the startup process.^[4][14][20]

Publications

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

In 2005, Blank published "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win," (K&S Ranch Press) which details his approach to the Customer Development process.^[7] In the book, Blank outlines his views about how entrepreneurship is a practice that can be actively managed rather than an art which must be passively experienced.^[12] The book is viewed in entrepreneurship circles as the definitive source on the Customer Development methodology.^[12]

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Blank released a second book in 2010, "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" which relates stories from his life as an entrepreneur.^[7] The collection of material develops a narrative about how to live life amid the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley startups.^[25]

The Startup Owner's Manual

Steve Blank and Bob Dorf co-authored "The Startup Owner's Manual", which was released in March 2012.^[26][27] The 608-page reference manual details a scientific approach to entrepreneurship and emphasizes the importance of "rigorous and repeated testing."^[6][10] The work draws on ideas from The Business Model Generation and The Four Steps to the Epiphany.^[6] According to Blank, the book was designed to be used as an "encyclopedia and a blueprint" for startups.^[28]

Blog

Blank authors a personal blog that addresses issues of entrepreneurship.^[4] In 2012, his blog was ranked one of the "10 Must-Read Blogs for Any Lean Startup" by Welovelean.com.^[29] The blog is considered a must-read for entrepreneurs and is often syndicated by UC Berkeley, VentureBeat, and Huffington Post. He also writes weekly for the Wall Street Journal Accelerators blog and occasionally for Forbes, the Huffington Post and in Japan for NikkeiBP."^[5][28][30]

Academic Teaching Career

Blank has taught entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students. His courses are available at a variety of institutions, including Stanford, the Haas School of Business, the University of California Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, and Columbia.^[8][9][31] His curricula commonly focus on the Customer Development methodology that he developed throughout his career as a serial-entrepreneur and conservationist.^[10] Blank actively lectures at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the joint Berkeley/Columbia MBA program.^[32]

In 2009 Blank won the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in Management Science and Engineering.^[5] That same year he was also named one of the Top 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Mercury News.^[33] In 2010, Blank was a recipient of the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Blank was the commencement speaker at Philadelphia University in 2011, and in 2012 The Harvard Business Review named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation and CNBC recognized him as one of the "11 Notable Entrepreneurs Teaching the Next Generation."^[32][34] In 2013, Blank was the commencement speaker at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering.^[35]

In May 2013, Blank wrote the cover story in the Harvard Business Review.^[36]

The Lean LaunchPad

At the start of 2011, Blank launched the Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford University. The class teaches founders how to reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development. In July 2011 he was asked by the National Science Foundation to adapt the class to be the curriculum for its Innovation Corps which develops and nurtures a national innovation ecosystem by helping discoveries from fundamental research to become new companies. The NSF teachers will teach 150 science and engineering teams in 2012 and will expand to 350 teams in 2013.^{[1][3][37][38]}

In the fall of 2012, an online version of the Lean LaunchPad was developed with help from Udacity. It incorporates learning aides such as videos, quizzes, and homework assignments to teach Blank's principles of entrepreneurship.^[39][40]

Public Service

Blank was a past Chairman of Audubon California and^[13] has also served on the board of the Peninsula Open Space Trust^[41] and was a trustee of U.C. Santa Cruz.^[8][13] Blank currently sits on the board of the California League of Conservation Voters, or CLCV.^[42] In 2007 he was appointed to the California Coastal Commission.^[43] He has made philanthropic gifts to preserve the California Coast and has contributed funds to support the visitors' center at Año Nuevo State Reserve and to the Peninsula Open Space Trust.^[3][41]

Reception

Blank is known amongst entrepreneurs and students as one of the "The Godfathers of Silicon Valley."^[28] His books, blog, and interviews are often referred to or featured in world news publications such as Reuters, the New York Times, Forbes, Inc, TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal.^{[1][2][4][10][28][44]} Blank has hosted numerous sold-out speaking events and conferences about entrepreneurship and the Customer Development methodology.^{[45][46][46][47][48]}

References

External links

• Steve Blank's Website
• Steve Blank on Twitter
• Steve Blank on LinkedIn
• Lean Startup on YouTube
• Steve Blank on the Business Model Canvas
• Steve Blank on Customer Development
• Steve Blank on TechSparks