Steve Blank (born 1953) is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur based in Pescadero, California.[1]
Blank is recognized for developing the Customer Development method that launched the Lean Startup movement, a methodology which recognized that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but require their own set of processes and tools to be successful.[2][3] His Lean Launchpad class (taught as the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps) has become the standard for commercialization for all federal research.[1]
Retired since 1999, Blank writes and teaches about Customer Development and the Lean Startup method. He is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford;[4][5] lectures at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and is a senior fellow at Columbia University.[6] He has written four books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, The Startup Owner's Manual and Holding a Cat by the Tail.[7][8]
Frederick Emmons Terman (/ˈtɜːrmən/; June 7, 1900 – December 19, 1982) was an American professor and academic administrator. He is widely credited (together with William Shockley) as being the father of Silicon Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman The "Birthplace of Silicon Valley" garage in Palo Alto, where William Hewlett and David Packard started developing their audio oscillator in 1938 (photographed 2016)
From left to right: Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last. (1960). The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor
The historic marker at the Fairchild building at which the "traitorous eight" set up shop and the first commercially practical integrated circuit was invented
Members of the PayPal Mafia on Fortune magazine dressed in mafia-like attire. From left to right, top to bottom: Jawed Karim, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andrew McCormack, Premal Shah, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Roelof Botha, Russel Simmons
"PayPal Mafia" is a term used to indicate a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies[1] such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies. Six members, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Keith Rabois, have become billionaires.
