An edited version of this article previously appeared in the Boston Consulting Group’s strategy think tank website. I spent last week at a global Fortune 50 company offsite watching them grap… | Continue reading
This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six … | Continue reading
Portions of this post previously appeared in War On the Rocks. Looking at a satellite image of Ukraine online I realized it was from Capella Space – one of our Hacking for Defense student te… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in TechCrunch. Cram downs are back – and I’m keeping a list. At the turn of the century after the dotcom crash, startup valuations plummeted, burn rates were unsust… | Continue reading
If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics Richard Feynman Tens of billions of public and private capital are being invested in Quantum technologies. Coun… | Continue reading
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me… | Continue reading
The last year has seen a ton written about the semiconductor industry: chip shortages, the CHIPS Act, our dependence on Taiwan and TSMC, China, etc. But despite all this talk about chips and semico… | Continue reading
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m… | Continue reading
As an entrepreneur at times you forget that being in charge doesn’t mean you have to know everything. When it feels like you’re trapped facing an unsolvable dilemma, and wrestling with a seemingly … | Continue reading
This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. See the Secret History bibliography for s… | Continue reading
Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business mo… | Continue reading
A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to in the last couple years, but this one just made my head explode.… | Continue reading
I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices t… | Continue reading
There are no facts inside your building, so get the heck outside I just had a call with Lorenz, a former business school student who started a job at a biotech startup making bacteria to take CO2 o… | Continue reading
As Director of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force Pete Newell delivered innovation at speed and scale in the Department of Defense. Pete is now CEO of BMNT, a company that delivers innovat… | Continue reading
One of the ironies of being a startup is that when you are small no one can put you out of business but you. Paradoxically, as your revenues and market share increase the risk of competitors damagi… | Continue reading
Our recent national security class at Stanford, Technology, Innovation, and Modern War was designed to give students insights on how the onslaught of new technologies like AI, machine learning, aut… | Continue reading
We just held our second session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Given the tech-centricity of Stanford and Silicon Valley, Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I design… | Continue reading
The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavio… | Continue reading
Rise Up “Let’s do something to help with the pandemic.” In April, with the economy crashing, and the East Coast in lockdown, I heard this from Stanford instructors Tom Bedecarre and Todd Basche, bo… | Continue reading
Remote education in the pandemic has been hard for everyone. Hard for students having to deal with a variety of remote instructional methods. Hard for parents with K through 12 students at home try… | Continue reading
Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble. —– We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato fa… | Continue reading
A version of this article appeared in War on the Rocks. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The coun… | Continue reading
We Sleep Peaceably In Our Beds At Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready To Do Violence On Our Behalf Everyone has events that shape the rest of their lives. This was one of mine. ——… | Continue reading
We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery. S… | Continue reading
Over the last month billions of people have been unwilling participants in the largest unintentional social experiment ever run – testing how video conferencing replaced face-to-face communic… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra… | Continue reading
It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether t… | Continue reading
Jeff Epstein is on the board of Shutterstock, Twilio, Kaiser Permanente, and was the CFO of Oracle, DoubleClick, Nielsen and King World and is an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. He … | Continue reading
“Winter is coming.” This is the one blog post that I hope I’m completely wrong about. With the Covid-19 virus a worldwide pandemic, if you’re leading any startup or small business, you have to be a… | Continue reading
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be… | Continue reading
If you’re a busy startup founder, you’re likely delegating the task of scheduling key meetings about things you want/need to your admin. This is a mistake. That’s because the dialog you have in set… | Continue reading
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo… | Continue reading
Every year I teach classrooms full of students who leave class understanding the basics of how to search for product/market fit—and thinking their next goal is to “get funded.” That’s a mistake. Th… | Continue reading
Say not in grief he is no more – but live in thankfulness that he was If you’re reading my blog, odds are you know who Clayton Christensen was. He passed away this week and it was a loss to u… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in War On The Rocks There was a time when much of U.S. academia was engaged in weapon systems research for the Defense Department and intelligence community. Some o… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. The type of disruption most companies and government agencies are facing is a once-in-every-few-centuries event. Disruption today is… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. The type of disruption most companies and government agencies are facing is a once-in-every-few-centuries event. Disruption today is… | Continue reading
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techn… | Continue reading
Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of this century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models… | Continue reading
In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. As a reminder, this post is not legal advice, it’s not even advice.… | Continue reading
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one o… | Continue reading
I’m a big fan of McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model of innovation. (if you’re not familiar with it there’s a brief description a few paragraphs down.) It’s one of the quickest ways to describe an… | Continue reading
Five years ago we brought evidence-based entrepreneurship to Life Sciences – teaching the first Lean Lean Launchpad class at UCSF, then the NIH and Imperial College. But it’s been awhil… | Continue reading
The team at Innovation Leader had me over to share some observations on how to survive in a world of disruption in large organizations. It’s worth a listen – here. . 5:30: The cultural … | Continue reading
I know a change is going to come If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing R… | Continue reading