Customer Development, Company Building, Standard Work

Steve Blank Product Market Fit Transcript

The last step in customer development is about company building. And for me, company building is the Shakespearean tragedy of an entrepreneur. Anybody ever hear stories of entrepreneurs whose company have gone public and they’ve been thrown out of it. Oh, couple of hands, oh, lot of hands. It’s almost a lore in Silicon Valley. Gee, the VCs took their company away from them. Oh, they lost their company. Oh, they were great entrepreneurs, but then they brought in the suits. Almost a lore in Silicon Valley. Turns out, that what most entrepreneurs don’t understand is when companies are becoming successful, all the skills that made them great entrepreneurs may or may not be useful in the next phase of a company, and in turn, scare the heck out of investors, because while you might be great at starting and finding new businesses, typically when you company gets to this phase, you’re growing the business, and you’re doing something repeatable and scale-able. Might not be the same skills that worked early on. And I call it the Shakespearean tragedy is because world class entrepreneurs here are not necessarily the same people who built the company. And yet another irony is the largest technology companies are run by their founders — Microsoft, Oracle, Jobs at Apple. Interesting conundrum, but then there’s a gap in between.