Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, having worked in 8 start-ups in two decades (with four IPOs). He currently works as an academic, teaching at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and NYU.
Blank has changed how start-ups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught world-wide; how science is commercialised in the US, and how companies and the government innovate. He is the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement and the bestselling Startup Owner’s Manual.
Named as one of the Thinkers 50 list of top management thinkers and recognised by the Harvard Business Review as one of 12 Masters of Innovation, Blank is also Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University. His Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford, Berkeley and Columbia is taught in more than 75 universities around the globe.
The Innovation Corps class Blank created for the National Science Foundation is the standard for science commercialisation in the US. And his Hacking for Defence class at Stanford is revolutionising how the US defence and intelligence community can deploy innovation with speed and urgency.
His talk The Secret History of Silicon Valley has become the standard history of why entrepreneurship blossomed in Silicon Valley while stillborn elsewhere. It has made him an unofficial expert and frequent speaker on the rise of entrepreneurial clusters as well as the role of the US government and military’s influence on entrepreneurship.
From 2006-13 Blank served as a public official in California as Commissioner on the California Coastal Commission, the public body that regulates land use and public access on the California coast.
