The "Blank Check" of Entrepreneurship

Two seconds left.  You can feel your quads burning.  Your form on the ice is rock solid.  As you race past the last defender, the only thing standing between you and the win is the goalie who you’ve beaten one-on-one countless times.  You’ve been practicing for this moment your entire life.

You accelerate towards victory, when suddenly… BOOM. An unanticipated body check, from who else, but Steve Blank. You are slammed against the wall and your entire game-plan is thrown off-course.  S.G. Blank from the opposing team has just issued his signature move, the "Blank Check" -- you know it’s going to hurt tomorrow.  Even minutes after the impact, you can still hear Blank taunting you with his infamous saying, “Get out of the building!”

   

Getting burned on your way to victory is precisely what happens when you try to execute a business plan devised inside your company walls.  As Steve Blank would say, “No business plan ever survives first contact with the customer.” When Steve Blank, author of “The Startup Owner's Manual,” the genius behind the Customer Development process, and entrepreneurship professor at Stanford, gives you a message, he means business.  You better write this one down.

Today’s post is dedicated to his iconic message, “Get out of the building.” Your initial goal as an startup founder is not to execute a business plan.  Thinking you can build it, and then they will come, is thinking inside the building.  You have to go into the world, meet potential customers, talk to them, and learn from these interactions.  This is precisely what getting out of the building means.  You have to search for a business model.  If you plan on scoring without pivots, you are likely planning to fail.

According to Steve Blank, a startup is a temporary organization whose goal is to search for a scalable business plan.  And the magic can only happen when you go outside your comfort zone, when you talk to people.  This is exceptionally difficult for technical founders to grasp.  Dear technical masterminds with an itch for entrepreneurship: “getting out of the building” is the single most important piece of advice taken from all of Steve Blank’s writings.  Years of training, building things, and being on the forefront of technology have likely given you a skewed perspective on what the world wants.  To become a successful entrepreneur, you must first undo the damage of over-education.  Once you learn how the world thinks, your technical talent won’t go away, and you’ll be in a great position to lead a great company.

I wrote this blog post for a few reasons. Foremost, as a first-time startup founder, I've been reading endless books on the subject and writing helps me remember what I learned. I guess this blog is now about computer vision and entrepreneurship. Secondly, this post serves as a note-to-self because I've been guilty of engineering products to death and skipping customer development altogether (as you'd expect from a Robotics PhD).

To learn more about Steve Blank and his ideas on entrepreneurship, the Customer Development process, and Lean startups, take at look at the following resources:

Steve Blank

Steve Blank’s Entrepreneurship Blog (has lots of great video links)
http://steveblank.com/

Steve Blank’s Free Udacity Course “How to Build a Startup” (this was my first ever MOOC!)
https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245

Steve Blank’s book “Four Steps to the Epiphany,” which is the most influential book I read in the past 10 years.  As groundbreaking as Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was to science, Blank's "Epiphany" will likely go down in history as the one that changed the course of entrepreneurship.
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507

P.S. Another great book I just finished reading, Made to Stick, contains a similar point referred to as “The Curse of Knowledge.”  The curse of knowledge happens when your message fails to get across because you assumed everybody else is a knowledgeable as you. Or as Steve Blank would say -- you built a feature-rich product flaunting the benefits of advanced features without understanding that the world isn't filled with technical experts. Nobody cares about your features. Not yet. Get out of the building.

100,000+ page views on my computer vision blog

I like high-risk / high-reward activity.  While some say that this is my temperament (perhaps a vestige of youth?) I simply say: "that's how I roll."  Maybe I was too young when I read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or maybe I was born with iconoclastic ideals, but I earnestly believe that life is too short to always do what you've been told.  One of my favorite maxims is the following: "The only limits we have are the ones we impose upon ourselves."

I took a gamble when I started this blog, blurring the line between all things related to computer vision, philosophy, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other fun things which constitute my intellectual life.  During my PhD I was even discouraged from blogging, because "my superiors" incessantly reminded me that "you get famous by writing CVPR papers" and not by wasting time maintaining a "cute" blog.  Today I'd like to argue that my adventure in blogging has not been a failure at all!

I had multiple reasons for wanting to blog, several of which I list below:

• I wanted to practice my writing, and what better way to practice writing than by writing!
• I wanted an outlet to discuss certain ideas which I find invaluable in my pursuit of building intelligence, but which aren't necessarily publishable.  On my blog I am the sole contributor, the sole editor.  If you don't like what I have to say, start your own blog.  I don't need anonymous reviews, the CVPR submission process stresses me out enough for one lifetime.
• I wanted a medium to advertise my own work as well other works which I find important for graduate students in Computer Vision to know about.
• I wanted to expose the field of Computer Vision to a broader audience and hopefully get others excited about this amazing research field.

Today I'm glad to announce that according to statcounter, my computer vision blog has reached over 100,000 views.  In an absolute sense, this really is nothing to be excited about.  By since my CMU homepage has approximately 30,000 views, this means that my blog is 3x as popular as my academic homepage!  Next goal: 1,000,000 page views!

I actually meet more people that know me through my blog than through my research papers, even though I put in 100x the effort in doing the research behind those papers.  I don't plan on taking up blogging full time anytime soon, but it feels good to know that my blogging adventure has paid off.

Here are some of the top keywords which have been used to find my blog:

computer vision blog

tombone

cmu computer vision blog

newton fractal matlab

tombone's blog

Here are some of my most popular blog posts of all time:

Computer Vision is Artificial Intelligence

The vision hacker culture at Google

graph visualizations as sexy as fractals

Simple Newton's Method Fractal code in MATLAB

Kinect Object Datasets: Berkeley's B3DO, UW's RGB-D, and NYU's Depth Dataset

I encourage anybody who reads my blog to shoot me a quick "yo what's up!" at a local conference or where ever else our paths might cross.  I also encourage everybody to suggest the types of things they would like to read about on my blog.

blogging from CVPR2010

It might not be one of those glamorous Apple events during which Steve Jobs introduces a new shiny gadget for the masses to desire, but plenty of exciting stuff happens at CVPR which instills desire into our souls, that is, the souls of computer vision scientists. Wouldn't you rather see the Great Torralba give a talk over some big company's chief executive officer? For those of you who do not know what CVPR is -- it is one of the big Computer Vision conferences during which we (the geeks, scientists, engineers, developers, hackers, and mathematicians) exchange ideas regarding our most recent research in the world of computer vision.

I am flying to SF tomorrow morning, and will be blogging about some of the cool papers I encounter at this year's CVPR. I do not have a paper at this year's conference so I'm in full assimilate-knowledge mode where I hope to absorb thousands of ideas related to my field. I already mentioned some of Kristen Grauman's cool segmentation papers, but expect to see in the next several blog posts many additional discussions for what I think are "exciting" papers. I am already getting excited and have plenty of papers to read during my flight, in addition to finishing Everything is Miscellaneous. I will be blogging from CVPR, like an Apple fanboy would at one of those Apple WWDC events -- but I will share math, theory, algorithms, and the like.

As always, the list of CVPR 2010 papers on the web can be found here.