Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and the author of the critically-acclaimed The Four Steps To the Epiphany, recently gave a talk at the Lean Startup Meetup in San Francisco last week.  It’s a great talk, and well worth your time if you yourself are an entrepreneur.

Excerpt about startups and customer development:

1. Startups weren’t small versions of large companies
2. Startups are about learning/discovery, not execution
3. Entrepreneurs and their VCs were executing on guesses
4. The facts are outside your building

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/326506/sgblank_lsc_large.mov

UPDATE: This version of the movie stalls out about two thirds of the way through, as Steve is talking in front of a slide titled “The Metrics”.  It’s mystifying to me why QuickTime doesn’t show you elapsed time / remaining time in its movies.  And I have to upgrade to a Pro account to save a QuickTime movie locally?  Go fuck yourselves, Apple.

Here’s a lower-res version that hopefully won’t stall:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/326506/sgb_lsc_19_nov_09_small.mov