Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2024

One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?” This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team. It all depends on one question every startup CEO needs to ask.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

A version of this article previously appeared in Fortune. 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.

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Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 256

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

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.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 15, 2024

This post previously appeared in Defense News and C4SIR. 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.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2024

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. It’s been rewarding to see tech entrepreneurship become an integral part of the economy and tech companies become some of the most valued companies in the world.

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