Steve Blank Podcast

1978. Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. If you think the Cold War turned out the right side up (i.e. Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. And no one who really knew could tell you.

I love business plan competitions. I hate business plan competitions.

I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” which defined Vietnam for my generation. (Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.)

I was visiting a friend whose company teaches executives how to communicate effectively. He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name.

This article in the NY Times about China’s thinking strategically about electric cars was a poignant contrast to our struggles in the U.S. with the auto bailout. It reminded me about the adage, “when you’re up to your neck in alligators, the last thing you remember is that you were supposed to drain the swamp.” Memo to Washington – weren’t we were to be the country innovating here?

I saw an article in the New York Times about Google’s hiring practices that reminded me of the differences between great big successful technology companies and small scrappy startups.

Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? by Steve Blank

The Curse of a New Building by Steve Blank

I was lucky to have been standing in the right place when video became part of the Macintosh. And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect.

While this story is about my experience in packaging for computer retail channels, if you substitute the word “web site” for retail, you’ll get the idea why these lessons were timeless for me.

At SuperMac, I thought I was good VP of marketing; aggressive, relentless and would take no prisoners – even with my peers inside the company. But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved me to play forever on a different field.

A year after we started repositioning the company, Engineering, which had been working on a family of new products literally for years, came to deliver some good news and bad news.

SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical Execution — the Potrero Benchmarks by Steve Blank

In WW II, the U.S. outsourced advanced weapons systems development to civilians. The weapons they developed won the war. It’s time to do that again. This new administration can make it happen.

In March 2022 I wrote a description of the Quantum Technology Ecosystem. I thought this would be a good time to check in on the progress of building a quantum computer and explain more of the basics.

“Only the Paranoid Survive” Andy Grove – Intel CEO 1987-1998 I just had an urgent “can we meet today?” coffee with Rohan, an ex-student. His three-year-old startup had been slapped with a notice of patent infringement from a Fortune 500 company. “My lawyers said defending this suit could cost $500,000 just for discovery, and potentially millions of dollars if it goes to trial. Do you have any ideas?”

What Does Product Market Fit Sound Like? This. by Steve Blank

Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? Looking for DoD customers? How do you know if they have money to spend on your product? It almost always starts with a Program Executive Office.

Imagine you got a job offer from a company but weren’t allowed to start work – or get paid – for almost a year. And if you can’t pass a security clearance your offer is rescinded. Or you get offered an internship but can’t work on the most interesting part of the project. Sounds like a nonstarter. Well that’s the current process if you want to work for companies or government agencies that work on classified programs.

Seemingly overnight, disruption has allowed challengers to threaten the dominance of companies and government agencies as many of their existing systems have now been leapfrogged. How an organization reacts to this type of disruption determines whether they adapt or die.