Steve Blank

Much like my career, in the last two years this blog has traveled a serendipitous path. I orignally wrote it with four goals in mind:

• First, to explain to my kids, then just graduating from High School, stories about their dad’s life when he was their age. And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.)
• Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade.
• Third, to share both thinking and practice as I learned how to teach entrepreneurs (the way one teaches artists and musicians.)
• Fourth, as a public official in the State of California, to offer a window on how public policy on California Coastal protection gets made. The Coastal stories are going to have to wait until I’m no longer a public official. (With Jerry Brown as our new governor I’m up for reappointment so you might get to hear the stories soon, or may have to wait a bit longer.)

On my first day as a blogger I got 20 views. Now I’ve had days with 20 viewers per minute. So Happy New Year to my 100,000-plus monthly readers throughout the world, and to many more who read my posts via some of the most important media in the startup/tech/entrepreneurship world, in more languages and places than I can keep track of.

Now Hear This
For 2011, I’m glad to announce that you can now hear my blog posts via a podcast that you can subscribe to, download or have emailed to you a few days after each blog post goes live. An innovative entrepreneur put his company to work delivering the podcasts with his compliments. Marcos Polanco, founder of Clearshore and himself a serial entrepreneur, “never found time to read the blog, no matter how much I loved it. “I told Steve” said Marcus, “in true hacker fashion, I was too lazy to read his blog, and I figured others must be in the same spot, so I proposed to turn the blog into a podcast instead.”

Marcos has agreed that the list of podcast subscribers will never be rented, sold or traded to anyone (same goes with our own email list). His big payoff from this effort is the chance to put a few lines of copy about his latest venture, Clearshore, at the bottom of each podcast link email. Clearshore is a “matchmaker” that helps small businesses get their fair share of the $60-billion US government budget for R&D and innovation. Today, startups receive only 4% of those funds, something Clearshore–now in the customer discovery phase–is out to change.

To add your email to the free podcast alert service, click here.

Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here

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