Before blossoming into a Silicon Valley startup guru, Steve Blank spent four years as an electronics technician in the Air Force, including a stint working on fighter jets in Thailand at the tail end of the Vietnam War.
In the decades since, Blank has founded or worked with eight startup companies in Silicon Valley, including co-founding software developer E.piphany. He’s a godfather of the “Lean Startup” movement — a methodology that helps get products into the hands of customers sooner by understanding that startup firms are not simply smaller versions of big companies — and he teaches entrepreneurial innovation at Stanford University’s engineering school in California.
