Steve Blank

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea - that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups - to something that everyone agrees is a way to

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries. Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn't just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like

This article previously appeared in The Cipher Brief. For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event - the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor's algorithm and break the public

This article previously appeared in the Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) This is the 16th year we've been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordi

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and mi

The cost of not having hardened aircraft shelters during the 2026 Iran War came home when Iran destroyed an AWACS aircraft and KC-135 tankers sitting in the open. Meanwhile, China, Iran and North Korea have made massive investments in hardened shelters an

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival If you started a company more than two years ago, it's likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed arou

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It's Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to d