Blank, Steve oral history, part 3 of 3

Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur, author, professor, venture investor, and widely sought-after consultant to business, education and government. He provided an extensive oral history, in three parts, for the Computer History Museum over the period July – November 2019. What sets Steve apart from so many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is not only the wide variety of startups he has been involved with, but his ability and willingness to digest these experiences into a set of “learnings” which he has cogently described in his many books, papers, lectures, and blog posts. He co-created the Lean Startup methodology and was the author of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. In this, the third part of his 3-part oral history, Steve goes into detail on the founding and rapid growth of his most successful startup, Epiphany. An enterprise software company founded in 1996, it grew rapidly and launched its IPO in 1999. By then he had left the company, but he played an essential role in building the company into a leader in the nascent CRM space, long before that became an essential element of modern business. Steve was only 45 at the time and his impact on the entrepreneurial community was just beginning to be felt. In collaboration with others, he captured his most important “learnings” in the “Lean Startup” movement. He authored several books, including “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, became an adjunct professor at Stanford and UC Berkeley and Columbia business schools, and brought the Lean Startup concepts to startups. And by developing the curriculum for the National Science Foundation I-Corps, taught thousands of government funded researchers how to get out of the building and talk to customers.