Comments on: Steve Blank on small startups, big execution & Steve Jobs

By: Matt A.

Matt A. — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:26:40 +0000

Great lessons from Steve Blank, as always!

If only he would embellish less in his practical examples of other companies, and maybe tell a few more personal war stories from his own successes, it would be more enjoyable to listen to him.

By: Scott Hildebrand

Scott Hildebrand — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:04:02 +0000

I’ve seen the Videology commercial 5 times now, and I still have no idea what they do!

By: Curly

Curly — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:37:28 +0000

Another thing Steve mentioned was passion (and how entrepreneurs have a calling). This seems spot on, yet the loud mouth Mark Cuban says “follow your effort” instead of “follow your passion”. Hmmm ..

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/18/dont-follow-your-passion-follow-your-effort/

By: Eddie

Eddie — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:22:08 +0000

Great interviews, Steve Blank is a world class citizen and a true gem. All of his comments were quite insightful. Regarding the comments about Amazon, I think its true that most people still don’t realize what Jeff Bezos et al have done for the world. However, if a startup (whilst searching) builds something and needs to pivot, and then later scale and bring in a VC like Fred Wilson, there still is some risk regarding using AWS (the vendor lock-in notion still exists), such that when the startup changes from a search-oriented temporary company to a business that fills roles (jobs) in the process of scaling, what happens if the world changes by that time and the business (as an artificial person) needs to have the option to switch out of Amazon to something else? At that time it might be very expensive to switch. At the same time, what entrepreneur wants to sit around waiting for the ideological open cloud / intra cloud ala Vint Cerf to emerge? By the way, it would be cool for GigaOm to interview Hal Varian about the topic of startups and “micro multinationals” again (we haven’t heard from Hal in a while)!

By: yuryprokashev

yuryprokashev — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:50:16 +0000

I like his definition of “designed for search” organization. :)
The key question really is to find somebody, who can fund your “search” and learning and fully support your execution strategy…

And one very bad thing about this book is that it yet doesn’t have Kindle edition… :(

By: Mike Speranza

Mike Speranza — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:43:01 +0000

I love that he’s focusing more on experiencing in his classes and students are basically starting up businesses rather that digesting countless number of books and studies. That’s a true entrepreneurship course.

By: samson

samson — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:15:26 +0000

agreed

By: me

me — Sat, 12 May 2012 13:09:41 +0000

Enough said Quickly into part 1: Important today, due to many aspects of the web, is Marketing. Should be 1st priority to any business. So CONSUMER and CUSTOMER interest and feedback
Essential to shaping Business at every level of its growth, and must evolve or keep pace with change to survive.

By: Manpreet Singh

Manpreet Singh — Sat, 12 May 2012 07:37:34 +0000

I wonder what happened to the online course that Steve Blank was going to offer at Coursera.

By: ASH

ASH — Sat, 12 May 2012 07:13:18 +0000

Entrepreneurship is calling, not a job. Totally, agreed.