Steve Blank has become a regular read for me.  His most recent post, Why Product Managers Wear Sneakers, is classic Blank.  While the post has an 81 page slide deck attached, it is redeemed by a list of 7 points that convey the gist of what Steve has to say.  They are all good, but there are two that jump out as Steve Blank chestnuts that somehow can’t be repeated often enough.  They are:

startups are not smaller versions of large companies; and

[They [product managers] are] an asset to a startup if they understand that their job is to get the founder outside the building and in front of customers.

It was T.S. Eliot who said (actually wrote) about literary criticism that “there is no method; the only method is to be very intelligent.”  In some ways, this is Steve Blank’s point.  You can’t run a start up by the numbers.  The methods and procedures that apply, and work, in large well established companies almost guaranty failure in a start up.  Why?  Because there are too many unknowns. 

At the risk of saying the obvious, IBM has the history and the resources to thoroughly research any important (or even unimportant decision).  Companies like IBM don’t have to operate on insufficient information about anything.  They know, because they have been in business for ever, what their customers want, who to call at the customer, same thing for suppliers and technical people.  Because they are IBM (or Microsoft or Cisco etc.) they have great access to anyone they want. 

As a matter of practical reality, founders of start ups don’t really know if their product will work or if anyone will buy it.   As Blank puts it, “startups search for a business model, large companies execute an existing one.”

Start ups also don’t have a ton of money or vast armies of people to find that business model.  So they have to make really important decisions on less than definitive information.  This is why Blank’s point about getting outside the building.  As he put it somewhere else, inside the building it is just speculation all the facts are outside the building. 

There is always a ton of stuff to do, you have to fight for time outside the building.  You have to be incredibly persistent until you reach and talk to the people in your ecosystem.  The best entrepreneurs do this instinctively.  They talk to everyone (well, almost). And they are comfortable with making decisions on less than complete information.