Doing something new every week in 2017 #7: Meeting Steve Blank

Zheng Li

Follow

Feb 23, 2017 · 3 min read

#7 of 52 new ways to challenge yourself in 2017 | Last week: Make Big Talk

There is a famous saying: you should never meet your idol, but I decided to throw caution to the wind last week when I met my long time tech idol Steve Blank. 😍

Steve has been my idol ever since I embarked on my own entrepreneurial journey many moons ago. His Four Steps to Epiphany is still one of my favourite books on business and building products. When founders come and ask me for my advice on business, my #1 advice is still “get the heck out of the building”.

In case you haven’t heard of Steve, he is considered the godfather of the popular Lean Startup movement.

Typical Wellington

Last week Steve was invited by CreativeHQ to give a talk on Customer Development (one of the main themes of his work) in Wellington through The Startup Garage Meetup group. Of course the city welcomed Steve with 150km/per hour or 93mph wind and horizontal rain, in typical fashion.

First impressions

Steve was super friendly and engaging before and after his talk. His answers were thoughtful and delivered in a funny and tongue-in-cheek way that made him seem very approachable. Even though he is famous, he came across as a genuine and warm person (exactly like how he appears in videos) and he did not disappoint with his passion and energy for Lean.

My favourite takeaways

I took notes furiously and here are a few gems from his talk:

• “Pivoting is a way to deal with the changes within a business without firing the founders”
• The three horizons of growth by McKinsey describes the 3 levels of innovation that companies typically use to drive innovation. Horizon 3 is the hardest level to achieve, because it involves a radical change that may not pay off for years or decades. Most company CEOs are operating on horizon 1, and that’s why they will eventually fail. Crazy people tend to operate at horizon 3 and every company needs some crazy people.
• Innovators have ideas, entrepreneurs do something about it.
• “The moment you take money from someone, their business model now becomes yours. If you cannot draw or understand their model, you will soon be an ex-founder.”
• A startup is a temporary model, because once you find a scalable model you become a business. “A 5 year old startup is 1 year of startup and 4 years of failure.”
• All businesses can use the Lean process but it will be applied differently. For startups it’s about scalability, for corporations, it’s about increasing marketshare and for governments, it’s about mission achievement.
• Most startups get acquired before they go public, so from day one, founders need to know their path to liquidity — who are the biggest companies that could acquire you. Work on the liquidity path by talking to their business development people and joining trade shows.
• Startups today get acquired because of visibility, not revenue and profit.
• You know you are doing Lean right, by monitoring your success metrics closely and know your indicators of traction.
• Know who your customers are and be ready to change tact when customers change. Case study: HarperCollins switched from selling to consumers to selling to authors to combat the likes of Amazon.
• “You negotiate commodity and seize opportunity.” — when referring to the treatment of Peter Thiel by the NZ media. He pointed out that NZ should’ve seen this an opporturnity to grow the NZ (tech) startup community.

This is the first time that I got to meet and speak with my long time idol. After I got over my starstruck, I was thoroughly impressed that Wellington was able to attract such an amazing international talent.

Thanks Wellington, CreativeHQ and the Startup Garage for this once in a life time opporturnity!

Coming up next: barre