Steve Blank

With the benefit of hindsight, entrepreneurs now understand the problem, namely that startups are not simply smaller versions of large companies.

My first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, was one of its first texts.

The Customer Development process I articulated in The Four Steps fit that need perfectly.

Customer development is paired with agile product development.

A startup is not a smaller version of a large company. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.

Small Business Entrepreneurship: In the United States, the majority of entrepreneurs and startups are found among 5.9 million small businesses that make up 99.7 percent of all U.S. companies and employ 50 percent of all nongovernment workers. These are often service-oriented businesses like drycleaners, gas stations and convenience stores, where entrepreneurs define success as paying the owners well and making a profit, and they seldom aspire to take over an industry or build a $100 million business.

Scalable startups are the work of traditional technology entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs start a company believing their vision will change the world and result in a company with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in sales. The early days of a scalable startup are about the search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Scale requires external venture-capital investment in the tens of millions to fuel rapid expansion. Scalable startups tend to cluster in technology centers such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, New York, Bangalore, and Israel and make up a small percentage of entrepreneurs, but their outsize return potential attracts almost all the risk capital (and press).

Large Company Entrepreneurship: Large companies have finite life cycles.

Social entrepreneurs build innovative nonprofits to change the world.

At the outset of the voyage, the path is unclear and no end is in sight.