TEC World Leaders Series : Legendary Steve Blank Presents his New Book!

Dear Friends,

Mark your calendars and join us on Thursday, May 3rd in Palo Alto for an exciting Fireside Chat with Steve Blank and his new book presentation!

Steve Blank is one of the rule-breakers of Silicon Valley, a co-founder of 8 startups, a lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, named one of the 10 influencers of Silicon Valley, author of two books – Four Steps to Epiphany and The Start-up Owner’s Manual, and the originator of the “customer development” methodology for getting a technology startup off the ground.

After the fireside chat, Steve kindly agreed to sign books that are included in the price of the tickets.

When: May 3, 2012, Thursday
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: WilmerHale, 950 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA

Eventbrite - Legendary Steve Blank presents his New Book!

Steve Blank

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

After I retired, I took some time to reflect on my experience and wrote a book (actually my class text) about building early stage companies called Four Steps to the Epiphany. My latest book, The Startup Owners Manual integrates 10 years of new knowledge (and fixes lots of typos.)

I moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that I developed in my book is one of the core themes in these classes.  In 2009, I was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. The same year, the San Jose Mercury News listed me as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley. In 2010, I was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business. In 2011 the National Science Foundation adopted my Lean Launchpad class. Nature wrote a story about the class here, National Public Radio did a story on the class here and so did the San Jose Mercury. In 2012 the Harvard Business Review listed me as one of the “Masters of Innovation.”

 

Agenda:

6:00pm – 6:30pm             Keynote Registration and Reception
6:30pm - 8:00pm              Fireside Chat with Steve Blank
8:00pm - 9:00pm              Networking & Book Signing

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart