Steve Blank on Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups

 

Thanks to my friend Philippe Lavie, President of KeyRoad Enterprises, who forwarded a great presentation by Stanford professor and 8-time entrepreneur Steve Blank, describing the techtonic shifts in entrepreneurship over the past decade:.Here are some highlights, though his whole talk is worth listening to:

  • In fundraising, “$500K is the new $5 million.” Blank cites lots of reasons for this including the presence of angels as a much more powerful group for funding early stage and the shift in major VC funds to becoming much more like hedge funds and not so much early stage.

  • There is a difference between startup and small business. If it’s VC-oriented it has to be scalable to $100 million or more. Most startups are small businesses – and there’s nothing wrong with that!

  • Very few founders survive the transition in fast growth startups, from search for a business model to process and growth-orientation

  • The new “Lean Startup” is an ongoing effort at better customer and agile development

  • Agile Development is critical and means:

    • Continuous deployment

    • Continuous learning

    • Self organizing teams

    • Minimum feature set

    • Pivots

  • William Durant versus Alfred Sloan as founder vs accountant (CEO) respectively of GM. I won’t give you the gloomy take on entrepreneur vs accountant…listen for yourself but entrepreneur skills do not equate to later stage growth skills.

  • Entrepreneurial education will change radically, because “E-School” is not like B-school

And check out Steve’s blog at www.SteveBlank.com.

 
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