Steve Blank Podcast

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups.

Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than the previous classes.

For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event – the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. It’s possible that the first cybersecurity apocalypse may have come early.

This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era.

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that 2) undefended high value fixed civilian infrastructure – oil t...

The Department of War is in the midst of the most ambitious acquisition reform in 60 years. It’s just in time as drone and missile warfare lessons (autonomy, Counter UAS, etc.) from Ukraine and the War in Iran are top of mind and reshaping what the DoW is buying. Reorganizing the DoW into Portfolio Acquisition Executives is reforming how the DoW is buying. The new Warfighting Acquisition System is...

If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die.

A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.) Recently my wife and I had something happen that made us reevaluate a 25-year-old relationship. These two bookends made me realize something larger: reevaluating all types of relationships – romantic, friendship, founders, busine...

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply even though AI Agents will upend all of this and PR will end up being one of the many businesses that will no longer e...

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32

Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened. And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives. This is one of those stories.

The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.)

In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) – 3,096 pages of legislative text and 636-page Joint Explanatory Statement.

The Department of War Just Shot the Accountants and Opted for Speed by Steve Blank

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders best practices – in a language and process that was easy to understand and imple...

The October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.

Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What do they do? And more importantly, why should anyone (outside of universities) care?

Great founders shine in a crisis.

How To Sell to the Dept of War – The 2025 PEO Directory by Steve Blank

How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt or die. This post tells the story of what happened when 4,000 companies faced a disruptive technology and why only one survived.

I’ve been having coffee with lots of frustrated founders (my students and others) bemoaning most VCs won’t even meet with them unless they have AI in their fundraising pitch. And the AI startups they see are getting valuations that appear nonsensical. These conversations brought back a sense of Déjà vu from the Dot Com bubble (at the turn of this century), when if you didn’t have internet as part...

We just finished the 15th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. The class had gotten so popular that in 2021 we started teaching it in both the winter and spring sessions. During the 2025 spring quarter the eight teams spoke to 935 potential customers, beneficiaries and regulators. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class.

We just finished our 10th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. What a year. Hacking for Defense, now in 70 universities, has teams of students working to understand and help solve national security problems. At Stanford this quarter the 8 teams of 41 students collectively interviewed 1106 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while...

International Policy students will be spending their careers in an AI-enabled world. We wanted our students to be prepared for it. This is why we’ve adopted and integrated AI in our Stanford national security policy class – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Here’s what we did, how the students used it, and what they (and we) learned.