Steve Blank: The Startup Owner’s Manual

Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician. He is recognized for developing the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement. Steve is also the co-founder of E.piphany.

His Google Tech talk, The Secret History of Silicon Valley, offers a widely regarded insider’s perspective on the emerging Silicon Valley’s start-up innovation. He’s also published three books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany*, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, and The Startup Owner’s Manual*.

In this conversation, Steve and I discuss the steps that leaders should take when making pivots. We explored the importance of creating a Minimal Viable Product or Minimum Viable Service, followed quickly with customer discovery, rapid testing, and refinement.

Key Points

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. -Friedrich Nietzsche

To pivot quickly:

• Create a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) or MVS (Minimum Viable Service).


• Conduct customer discovery: validate your idea by speaking with existing/potential customers about the new product/service.


• Do rapid testing: get your work into the hands of existing/potential customers quickly. Don’t try to get it perfect right out of the gate.


• Refine your offering: use fast feedback to make the product/service better.

Resources Mentioned

• Seven Steps to Small Business Recovery


• The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup


• How To Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act


• Customer Discovery In the Time Of the Covid-19 Virus

Related Episodes

• Ideas Worth Stealing From Top Entrepreneurs, with Dorie Clark (episode 318)


• Serve Others Through Marketing, with Seth Godin (episode 381)


• How to Build an Invincible Company, with Alex Osterwalder (episode 470)


• If You Build It, They Will Come (Dave’s Journal)

Discover More

Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.