Steven Gary Blank Quotes & Sayings

Facts live outside the building, where future customers live and work... — Steven Gary Blank

We know unequivocally that the traditional MBA curriculum for running large companies like IBM, GM and Boeing does not work in startups. In fact, it's toxic. — Steven Gary Blank

In tougher times, when dollars are tighter, the next round of funding may never come. — Steven Gary Blank

Your goal, after enough of these customer conversations, is to be able to stand up in front of your company and say, Here were our hypotheses about our customers, their problems, and how they worked. Now here's what they're saying their issues really are, and this is how they really spend their day. — Steven Gary Blank

To do this, you need to leave guesswork behind and get "outside the building" in order to learn what the high-value customer problems are, what about your product solves these problems, and who specifically are your customer and user (for example, Who has the power to make or influence the buying decision and who will use the product on a daily basis?). — Steven Gary Blank

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked. — Steven Gary Blank

A pivot is a substantive change in one or more of the nine boxes of the business model canvas. — Steven Gary Blank