Dear Friends,

Mark your calendars and join us on Thursday, May 3rd in Palo Alto for an exciting Fireside Chat with Steve Blank and his new book presentation!

Steve Blank is one of the rule-breakers of Silicon Valley, a co-founder of 8 startups, a lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, named one of the 10 influencers of Silicon Valley, author of two books – Four Steps to Epiphany and The Start-up Owner’s Manual, and the originator of the “customer development” methodology for getting a technology startup off the ground.

After the fireside chat, Steve kindly agreed to sign books that are included in the price of the tickets.

When: May 3, 2012, Thursday
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: WilmerHale, 950 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA

Steve Blank

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

After I retired, I took some time to reflect on my experience and wrote a book (actually my class text) about building early stage companies called Four Steps to the Epiphany. My latest book, The Startup Owners Manual integrates 10 years of new knowledge (and fixes lots of typos.)

I moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that I developed in my book is one of the core themes in these classes.  In 2009, I was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. The same year, the San Jose Mercury News listed me as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley. In 2010, I was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business. In 2011 the National Science Foundation adopted my Lean Launchpad class. Nature wrote a story about the class here, National Public Radio did a story on the class here and so did the San Jose Mercury. In 2012 the Harvard Business Review listed me as one of the “Masters of Innovation.”