Steve Blank

Steve Blank is an adjunct professor in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. A retired eight-time serial entrepreneur, Blank’s insight that startups are not smaller versions of large companies has reshaped the way startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught. His observation that large companies execute business models, but startups search for them, led him to realize that startups need their own tools, different than those used to manage existing companies.

Blank’s first tool for startups, the customer-development methodology, spawned the lean startup movement. The fundamentals of this methodology are detailed in his books, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and the “The Startup Owner’s Manual.” Blank teaches customer development and entrepreneurship at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley and Columbia University.

In 2011, he developed the “Lean LaunchPad,” a hands-on class that integrates business model design and customer development into practice through fast-paced, real-world customer interaction and business model iteration. In 2011, the National Science Foundation adopted Blank’s class for its Innovation Corps (I-Corps), training teams of the nation’s top scientists and engineers to take their ideas out of the university lab and into the commercial marketplace.

In 2014, the I-Corps program was expanded to include the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Departments of Energy and of Defense. Over 750 teams have gone through the I-Corps program.