Steve Blank Podcast

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, business partnerships/ventures, and even countries – is a healthy and normal part of growing, getting older and, at times, wiser.

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 exist in its current form. Here’s why.

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 implement. All from a practitioner’s point of view.

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 of your pitch you weren’t getting funded.

We just finished the 15thannual 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 simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products and developing a path to deployment.

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.

US global dominance in science was no accident, but a product of a far-seeing partnership between public and private sectors to boost innovation and economic growth.

The U.S. has spent the last 70 years making massive investments in basic and applied research. Government funding of research started in World War II driven by the needs of the military for weapon systems to defeat Germany and Japan. Post WWII the responsibility for investing in research split between agencies focused on weapons development and space exploration (being completely customer-driven) and other agencies charted to fund basic and applied research in science and medicine (being driven by peer-review.)

Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.