Steve Blank - Holding a Cat by the Tail

Table of Contents

I.

Entrepreneurship Is an Art

Entrepreneurs as Dissidents

November 6, 2012 (Steve Blank)

WATCH : Apple Commercial on YouTube

Heres to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Theyre not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you cant do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Countries that put their artists and protesters in jail will never succeed in building a successful culture of entrepreneurship. They will be relegated to creating better mousetraps or cloning other countries business models.

Entrepreneurs as Dissidents

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he ran the Think Different ads, a brilliant marketing campaign to make Apples core customers believe that Apple was still fighting for the brand .

But in hindsight, the ad captured something much more profound.

The crazy ones? The misfits? The rebels? The troublemakers? To celebrate those people as heroes requires a country and culture that tolerates and encourages dissent .

Because without dissent there is no creativity .

Countries that stifle dissent while attempting to encourage entrepreneurship will end up at a competitive disadvantage.

Pushing the Boundaries

Most startups solve problems in existing marketsmaking something better than what existed before. Some startups choose to resegment a marketfinding an underserved niche in an existing market or providing a good-enough low-cost solution. These are all good businesses, and theres nothing wrong with founding one of these.

But some small segment of founders are truly artists they see something no one else does. These entrepreneurs are the ones who want to change what is and turn it into what can be. These founders create new ideas and new markets by pushing the boundaries. This concept of creating something that few others seeand the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build itis at the heart of what these founders do.

The founders that make a dent in the universe are dissidents . They are not afraid to tell their bosses they are idiots or tell their schools they been teaching the wrong thing or to tell an entire industry to think differently. And more importantly, they are not afraid to tell their country it is mistaken.

Freedom of Speech, Expression, and Thought

Entrepreneurs in the United States take for granted our freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of thought. Its enshrined in our constitution as the first amendment .

In the last few years Ive traveled to lots of countries that understand that the rise of entrepreneurship will be an economic engine for the 21st century. In several of these countries, the government is pouring enormous sums into building entrepreneurship programs, faculties, and even cities. Yet time and again when I ask the local entrepreneurs themselves what questions they have, most often the first question is: How do I get a visa to the United States?

For years I thought the reason hands were raised was simply an economic one. The same countries that repress dissent tend to have institutionalized corruption, meaning the quality of your idea isnt sufficient enough to succeed by itself, you now need new friends in the right places. But I now see that these are all part of the same package. Its hard to focus on being creative when a good part of your creative energies are spent trying to figure out how to work within a system that doesnt tolerate dissent.

Lessons Learned

• Entrepreneurs require the same creative freedom as artists and dissidents.
• Without that freedom, countries will be relegated to cloning others business models or creating better versions of existing products.
• History has shown that the most creative people leave repressive regimes and create elsewhere.

Too Young to Know
It Cant Be Done

October 13, 2010 (Steve Blank)

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossibleand achieve it, generation after generation. -Pearl S. Buck

Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and youll hear a familiar list of adjectives: agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc.

What you dont hear often: they didnt know any better.

It Cant Be Done

I was just rereading Jessica Livingstons book Founders at Work , and a common thread through the stories reminded me that there is a type of technology innovation that occurs in startups when a founder/team simply doesnt know what theyre attempting is impossible.

Steve Wozniak at Apple building the Apple II floppy disk controller without ever seeing one. The original Fairchild Semiconductor team of Moore and Hoerni racing to build the first silicon diffused PNP and NPN transistors and ending up with Planar transistors and integrated circuits . The list of I just did it without knowing it was impossible appears time and again as a common thread in stories about technology innovation.

I got to see this firsthand when I was lucky enough to be present as an incredibly small team designed and built the Zilog and MIPS microprocessors. And at Ardent , I watched an equally minuscule company tackle building a supercomputer and again at E.piphany building a data warehouse.

Almost all these innovations were built by people in their twenties with a few of old-timers in their thirties. (One of the common themes was the physical effort to get these projects completedentrepreneurs staying up for days to finish a project and/or sleeping at work until it shipped.) I flew more red-eyes than I can remember, and also had days where I just slept in the office with the engineers.

Age Means Wisdom

Its not that older entrepreneurs cant start or build innovative companiesof course they can. Older entrepreneurs just work smarter and strategically. (Though my hypothesis is that funding from risk capital sourcesangels and VCs, dont follow a normal distribution curve for older founders.)

And if theyre really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20s and 30s who dont know what theyve been asked to do is impossible (exactly the strategy of my partner Ben at E.piphany ).

Older Means You Know Too Much

However, as Ive gotten older Ive observed that its not just that stamina that changes for entrepreneurs. One of the traps of age is growing to accept the common wisdom of whats possible and not. Accumulated experience can at times become an obstacle in thinking creatively. Knowing that it cant be done because you can recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination. This not only affects individuals, but happens to companies as they age.

When youre young anything seems possible.

And at times it is.

Entrepreneurship Is an Art,
Not a Job

March 31, 2011 (Steve Blank)

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. -George Bernard Shaw

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a science, and anyone could do it.

Im beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

Where Did We Go Wrong?