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Steve Blank hands a new owner's manual to startup founders

xconomy.com

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Re: Steve Blank hands a new owner's manual to startup founders

#41

Post by davidw »

sayemm wrote: post #39
waderoush wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't question either Eric Ries's or Steve Blank's chops as entrepreneurs. Read this piece we did at Xconomy, which includes the story of how Steve and Eric met and influenced one another: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/07/06/eric-ries-th...

Nice write-up, but their history/bio still doesn't give me any proof of their success in the startup world, outside of marketing lean startup stuff to other entrepreneurs, ironically. Taking advice from failed entrepreneurs is dangerous and a waste of time, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMVU

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank

They are both the real deal - especially Steve Blank, who did multiple companies.

Re: Steve Blank hands a new owner's manual to startup founders

#42

Post by sayemm »

davidw wrote: post #41
sayemm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice write-up, but their history/bio still doesn't give me any proof of their success in the startup world, outside of marketing lean startup stuff to other entrepreneurs, ironically. Taking advice from failed entrepreneurs is dangerous and a waste of time, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMVU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank They are both the real deal - especially Steve Blank, who did multiple companies.

Thanks a lot, that's helpful.

I do think is Steve Blank is more legit, but not because he did multiple companies - if you worked on several venture-backed companies throughout your life but they all went nowhere, you must suck as an entrepreneur. I just looked up Epiphany and this answers my question, he founded it, did $71.5M in revenue, and it IPO'd, so Blank definitely knows what he's talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany,_Inc.

IMVU on the other thand had good traction and Eric Ries was VP of Engineering there, but what's happened to it since? Just looking it up on crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/imvu - no big exit/big numbers or anything special like Epiphany?

And here's his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/eries - it just doesn't show any blockbuster results as an entrepreneur, just a lot of advising/marketing/blogging.

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