Steve Blank, Part 2 of 2

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a [00:00:30] biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of two interviews with Steve Blank. I lecture at the High School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s in the early two thousands he retired from the day to day involvement [00:01:00] of running a company. He has been teaching entrepreneurship training ever since. By 2011 he was said to have devised a scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the lean launchpad. The National Science Foundation caught wind of this and asked Steve to build a variation for teaching scientists and engineers how to launch startups. In 2013 Steve partnered with UCLA and the NSF to offer the lean launch pad class for life science and healthcare. In part two, Steve Talks about getting [00:01:30] the NSF lean launch pad classes going, the evolution of startup companies and innovation, and now Brad swift continued his interview with Steve Blank. 

Speaker 4:        Okay. 

Speaker 5:        In your experience with these scientists and teaching them, are these people self selected? They're the ones who are anxious and eager and there are other scientists maybe back in the lab are reluctant afraid of the process. 

Speaker 4:        So just the personality of it. Yeah, so this goes back to the comment I made earlier about entrepreneurs being artists. It was the implicit comment [00:02:00] I just kind of both through in the beginning, but as important is that you can't assign entrepreneurship as a job, right? If you really think about them, you can't split up a room and say, those of you on the left, you're going to be musicians. And those are you on the right, you're working on the assembly line like, Oh yeah, WTI. I mean, it doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. All right. Entrepreneurship is a calling. Just like art, just like music, just like writing is something you have to passionately want to do, but much like art, we've learned something [00:02:30] a couple hundred years ago that very early on in people's lives in elementary school and junior high school in high school, we want to have our depreciation. 

Speaker 4:        They're not intensive classes, but their exposure to art that people might not know their artists. They might not know they have a passion to paint or to sculpt or to write or to entertain. I will contend because entrepreneurship is an art. We actually need those type of classes early on because scientists didn't understand [00:03:00] that not was their passion to invent and create. They might actually have an equal passion to wait a minute, I actually want to take this thing all the way through when I want to see what happens. If hundreds of thousands of people