Kevin Warnock

Steve Blank at Commonwealth Club of California February 8, 2011. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

I got to briefly meet Steve Blank tonight. He addressed the Commonwealth Club of California, and I introduced myself to him after his remarks.

Steve Blank writes a great blog.

Blank also wrote what I consider perhaps the finest book I’ve read on how to begin and continue to operate a successful tech startup – The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This book made me feel like one of the luckiest guys in the startup world, because I sold my first Internet startup Hotpaper to Purple Communications and made money on it, even though I skipped Blank’s four steps and otherwise did what Blank would say was a shockingly poor job.

This book is superb because it gives clear instructions for what to do to dramatically improve the odds that your startup will make it. Perhaps the most useful advise is for founders to personally get out of the office and talk with potential customers before the product is even built.

It’s so easy as a founder to really believe that your vision makes sense and to just plow ahead, certain things will work out. Blank did that with some of his startups. Tonight he admitted losing $35 million dollars of venture capital money on a video game startup because he didn’t observe this fundamental step. Instead, he apparently relied on a cover story in Wired Magazine saying his company was great. He actually fired his director of sales because he reported three times to Blank that nobody wanted to buy his company’s products. Only after firing the director did Blank personally leave the building to talk with potential customers. These customers told him they would not buy, just as the recently fired director had accurately told him.

When I started my current company, Silveroffice, Inc., the makers of gOffice, the first true online office suite, I did not talk to any potential customers. I just assumed people would like to do their work online via a browser. This turned out to be correct in the end in a modest way, but in 2003, when I started the company, it was not obvious. At that point, gmail was still over a year away. Yes, the world had Hotmail and Yahoo mail, but that was before fast Internet connections became somewhat widespread. It’s no wonder gOffice is only a niche player today rather than an important destination as I hoped it would become.

I am trying to absorb the tremendous wisdom in Steve Blank’s book, and with any luck, I will pivot gOffice quickly and frequently until it flourishes.

I shot unprofessional, shaky video of the entire presentation this evening, and below I have embedded the full video so you can see Blank speak. If asked by Blank, his representatives or the Commonwealth Club I’ll take this video down. Blank is animated and persuasive. I wish I could take one of his classes he teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He said he once suggested students try to audit his classes if they couldn’t get in by signing up. He said the schools didn’t appreciate that offer when 100 more people than his classroom had seats for were hanging out in the hallway trying to get in. I don’t know if Blank posts his lectures online anywhere, but if there’s that kind of demand, I sense a popular YouTube channel in the making.

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, you must read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It’s a tough read. It’s an important read. Acting on its advice will be VERY HARD WORK. Remembering all its lessons will require reading it many times. This is a book to own, not check out of the library, because you’ll need to refresh your memory of its lessons periodically. With many books, you can safely forget the details. With this book, forgetting the details puts you in peril. I give this book my highest recommendation.