More Words of Wisdom from Steve Blank

by Scott Edward Walker on May 10th, 2014

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a short video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present startup guru Steve Blank, a highly-successful serial entrepreneur (with 30+ years of venture experience) and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and co-author of The Startup Owners Manual.

In this short clip, Steve shares a few nuggets for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “What you can’t ‘b.s.’… is getting out of the building and talking to hundreds of customers. You can’t fake that in a weekend.”  (at 1:02)
• “What you really need to do first is have a customer development process and talk to customers and do agile engineering — and build a product iteratively and incrementally.”  (at 1:29)
• “Before you hire all those people, you want a customer-development team driven by the founders.”  (at 2:15)
• “There are different venture capitalists that are happy to deal with different parts of the process.”  (at 3:21)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott