sent to San Jose, California, to install a system in a Ford Motor plant. He was surprised to hear radio ads from a company called Intel Corp. seeking scientists, engineers and technicians. He was stunned when he picked up a copy of the local newspaper and found a 48-page classified ad section that was almost all want ads seeking scientists, engineers and technicians. After they fin- ished their work at Ford, his colleague flew back to Michigan and Blank stayed in San Jose. He quickly got his first job in Silicon Valley—coincidentally for a startup founded by William Perry, who would go on to help revolutionize satellite reconnais- sance and later become secretary of defense.
STARTING ANEW WITH LEAN Twenty-one years and eight startups later, Blank retired. He began teaching entrepreneurship classes at Stanford and Berke- ley (he also teaches now at Columbia University, where he is a senior fellow for entrepreneurship).
He had time to think about why some startups succeeded and others failed. He “realized—heretically, at the time—that we were just missing something really big,” he told Army AL&T in an October 2016 interview. Entrepreneurs were focused on turning a technology into a product, building a company and then hoping to get to an initial public offering. Instead, most failed because they forgot to discover whether anyone wanted or needed their product.
What was missing, Blank realized, was the understanding that startups had almost nothing in common with large, success- ful companies. Large companies know their customers, what
products those customers will pay for, their pricing and their competitors. Startups know none of that.
His “Lean Startup” method boiled down to three basic steps:
• Articulate your hypotheses. What problem are you trying to solve? Who’s your customer? What solution do customers want to grab out of your hands? “Hypothesis is a fancy word for ‘we’re just guessing,’ ” Blank said. “I use the word ‘hypoth- esis’ at Stanford because students pay to be there and nobody wants to learn how to guess for $50,000 a year.”
• Get out of the building. Talk to at least 100 potential cus- tomers and stakeholders about your hypotheses. Have you identified the problem correctly? Can you validate your hypotheses? “Some hypotheses could be verified within 10 minutes, or it might take months,” Blank said.
• Build a minimum viable product (MVP)—the smallest thing that will get you the most learning at that point in time. It can be a wireframe, a PowerPoint, hardware, etc. Get cus- tomer feedback. If the feedback is good, refine and improve your MVP until it’s ready to roll out as a finished product. If it’s bad, figure out where you went wrong and change direc- tion (called a pivot). Tis way, if you’ve failed, you’ve failed early and inexpensively.
In 2005 Blank wrote “Te Four Steps to the Epiphany,” which launched the Lean Startup movement. One of his students, Eric Ries, followed up in 2011 with “Te Lean Startup.” Also in 2011,
A FORCE FOR CHANGE
Steve Blank testifies before the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Technology on Dec. 6 about expanding the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps. Blank developed the I-Corps into the federal standard for science commercialization in the United States, mirror- ing the Lean Startup approach. (Photo courtesy of Steve Blank)
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CRITICAL THINKING
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