19 Steve Blank
史蒂夫•布兰克，誉为硅谷创业导师、精益创业之父

名人标签

01 Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and academician.

史蒂夫·布兰克是硅谷的企业家和院士。

02 He has founded or worked within eight startup companies, four of which have gone public.

他曾创立了8家创业公司，其中4个已经上市。

了解他/她多少

Personal life

Blank was born to immigrant（移民）parents who ran a grocery in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan, but disliked being in school and dropped out after one semester.

Blank hitchhiked（搭便车）to Miami, where he found work at the Miami International Airport, loading racehorses onto aircraft. At the airport, Blank developed an interest in avionics, which he nurtured until the early 1970s when he joined the Air Force. When he was 20 years old, his military career took him to Thailand during the Vietnam War, where he was managing a team of 15 electronics technicians within a year and a half. Later on he left military and moved to Palo Alto, a town in an area which would ultimately（最后）become known as Silicon Valley.

阅读超链接

史蒂夫·布兰克出生在一个纽约的移民家庭，父母都没有上过大学，但是却寄希望在布兰克身上。之后虽然布兰克上的密歇根大学，可是他并不喜欢，所以在上了一学期之后就退学了。

史蒂夫·布兰克从事过几种不同职业。第一份职业是在越战期间服役于美国空军，后来他来到了硅谷，20多年的时间在硅谷进行科技创业。

Career

Steve Blank arrived in Silicon Valley at the start of the business boom in 1978.His first job within the region was with ESL, a startup that was a primary US intelligence company for National Means of Technical Verification.During his 34-year career, Blank founded or worked with a wide range of high-tech companies. Four of his companies went public.

Blank has since served on the boards of the public entities Macrovision/Rovi and Immersion as well as several private companies. He continues to invest in and advise Silicon Valley startups（创业企业）such as Udacity and Votizen.

阅读超链接

1978年他来到硅谷，开始成立8家初创企业中的第一家。1996年，布兰克在其住所客厅与他人共同创立第8家初创企业E.piphany公司。总体而言，这八家企业中有两家以惨败告终，一家在互联网泡沫时期大获全胜，几家“保本”，这也为后续的教学和图书的写作积累了大量实战经验。

妙语连珠

Many of you are going to take what you learned here, get a good job, get married, buy a house, have a family, be a great parent, serve your community and your country, hang with friends and live a good life and that's great. Minnesota is a wonderful place to hunt, fish, canoe, raise kids, and pursue lots of interests other than just your job. But all of you will ultimately make a choice… a choice about whether you “work to live” or whether you gonna “live to work.” That should be a conscious choice. Don't get trapped into（陷入）the daily routine of showing up and just getting by While you're excited about your first “real” job, recognize that your interests and those of your employer are probably not the same. Having your employer tell you what a great job you're doing and rewarding you for it is not the same as discovering your passion, and figuring out who you are, and what's rewarding for you. What I am saying is, “Don't let a career just happen to you.” And more importantly, as much you love, respect and honor your parents, don't live their lives. Your obligations（义务）to meet their expectations ended the day you became an adult. At the end of the day, you can decide whether you want to be an employee with a great attendance（出席）record, getting promoted to ever better titles and working on interesting projects or whether you want to attempt to do something spectacular（壮观的）this choice between be or do should be a question you never stop asking yourself—for the next 20 years. Be or do?

阅读超链接

精益创业之父史蒂夫·布兰克于2013年明尼苏达理工大学毕业典礼上发表了题为《父母为什么高兴？因为你们可能成为亿万富翁》的演说。演讲中，他鼓励毕业生们要做到真正的独立，选择适合自己的工作，不需受到外界干扰，并且与同学们分享了自己的创业经历，告诫大家要选择正确的职业道路以及认清工作与生活的关系。