Steve Blank is probably most well known for this picture about embracing change:

Observations about Silicon Valley:

• $500K is the new $5M
• Seed Funds are providing entrepreneurial education
• Customer Development / Lean Startup adoption:  We are all collectively getting smarter at a scary rate.

99.7% of all companies are <500 employees and employ half of the people in the country. In contrast, a scalable startup is designed to grow big and it typically needs risk capital.  (Note: venture capital was originally called “adventure capital.”)

Your job as an entrepreneur is to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.  Then build a business around it.  Founders depart before the company grows to a large business:

1. Search
2. Build
3. Grow

No business plan survives contact with customers.

Startups search and pivot.  Small and large companies execute.

Startups should focus on:

• metrics, not accounting.
• customer validation, not sales.
• customer development, not product management.
• agile development, not engineering.

Lean startups use agile and customer development to find profits.  (A high percentage of company founders come from dysfunctional families, but that’s another topic.)