Steve Blank (born 1953) is an American entrepreneur, educator, author and speaker based in Pescadero, California.
Blank created the customer development method that launched the lean startup movement, a methodology that recognized that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but require their own set of processes and tools to be successful. His Lean Launchpad class (taught as the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, or I-Corps) has become the standard for commercialization for all federal research and has trained 1,900 teams and launched 1,000+ startups. His Hacking for Defense Class has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Biography
Blank was born to immigrant parents in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan for one semester. Blank spent four years in the U.S. Air Force, and spent time in Thailand during the Vietnam War, where he was maintaining electronic warfare equipment.
Blank arrived in Silicon Valley in 1978. His first job in the region was with ESL, a pioneering company for National Reconnaissance founded by William Perry, later the US Secretary of Defense. The company helped the government understand the Soviets' technological and arms developments during the Cold War. Blank was part of 8 startups include Zilog and MIPS Computers, Convergent Technologies, Ardent, SuperMac Technologies, ESL and Rocket Science Games.
Blank co-founded his last startup, the Customer Relationship Management provider E.piphany, in 1996 and retired the day before its IPO in September 1999.
In 2005, Blank published The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win, which details his approach to the Customer Development process.
In 2010, Blank released a second book, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost which relates stories from his life as an entrepreneur. The collection of material develops a narrative about how to live life amid the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley startups.
Blank has given commencement addresses at Philadelphia University (2011), University of Minnesota (2013), ESADE Business School in Barcelona (2014), New York University Engineering School (2016), Dalhousie University (2017) and UC Santa Cruz (2019).
The Startup Owner's Manual, co-authored by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf was released in March 2012. The book draws on ideas from Business Model Generation and The Four Steps to the Epiphany and emphasizes the importance of rigorous and repeated testing.
Blank served on the California Coastal Commission from 2007 until he resigned his seat in 2013.
Blank hosted the SiriusXM radio show “Entrepreneurs are Everywhere'' from 2015-2016.
Blank served as a member of the Defense Business Board until December 2020, when he resigned in protest due to "[t]he abrupt termination of more than half of the Defense Business Board and their replacement with political partisans."
Academic teaching career
Blank is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford and is a Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. He was a past lecturer at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, NYU and at Imperial College in London. His Lean LaunchPad and Hacking for Defense curricula uses the customer development methodology and lean startup methods he developed throughout his career as a serial entrepreneur and academic.
Philosophy and work
Customer development methodology
Blank began to develop the customer development methodology in the mid-1990s and began teaching it at UC Berkeley in 2003. The concept replaced the existing method of guessing customer needs and instead details a scientific approach that can be applied by startups and entrepreneurs to improve their products‘ success by developing a better understanding of customers' problems/needs as well as the other hypotheses necessary to build a commercially successful company.
Key customer development concepts
Blank's customer development method includes four steps:
There are no facts inside the building, so get outside
While outside use the scientific method to test all the hypotheses about the proposed business model Hypothesis > design experiment > test > gather data > validate, invalidate or modify the hypothesis If you found the hypothesis wasn’t correct you could pivot i.e. modify the hypothesis The goal of the first two steps of customer development (Discovery and Validation) was to find the minimum feature set (also called the minimal viable product) that a startup could deliver.