Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur, academic, and author renowned as the driving force behind the Lean Startup movement and the creator of the Customer Development model. His core insight—the critical distinction between a startup's search for a business model and an existing company's execution—fundamentally launched modern entrepreneurship. With over 21 years across eight high-technology companies, including the co-founding of E.piphany, his expertise is built upon a high-stakes, real-world track record of success and failure.
His practical experience, which included co-founding E.piphany and holding roles at Zilog, MIPS Computers, and an early consulting stint with Pixar, provided the raw data for his seminal book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. He successfully transitioned from entrepreneur to highly-awarded educator, teaching entrepreneurship to graduate students at top universities including Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia, and NYU. The same year he received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford, he was listed as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley by the San Jose Mercury News.
Blank’s work is highly influential in the public sector. At the request of the National Science Foundation, he modified his "Lean Launchpad" class to create the curriculum for the NSF I-Corps, a program now taught at 98 universities. He has successfully co-launched programs like Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Climate and Sustainability at Stanford, with Hacking for Defense being adopted as a federal program in 2017. He has testified before Congress about the success of these programs.
As a highly sought-after speaker, honored as a Federal 100 Award winner and an Innovation Luminary, Blank’s keynotes provide candid, actionable insights from a career marked by "two large craters... one dot.com bubble home run and several base hits." His message is essential for leaders and organizations navigating significant change, offering the core strategies needed to mitigate risk, accelerate learning, and build scalable ventures across technology, life science, and national security domains.
