Welcome to the DEFAERO Andy Marshall Strategy Series, our discussion with leading thinkers on security, business and technology. Our guest is Steve Blank, an Air Force Veteran of the Vietnam War and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University where he teaches courses on Lean Startups, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

In 2016 he co-launched two new Management Science and Engineering  classes at Stanford – Hacking for Defense and its sister class –Hacking for Diplomacy. Steve is one of  Thinkers50's top global management thinkers and has written 3 books including: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owners Manual (co-authored with Bob Dorf) and Holding a Cat By Its Tail.

His talk, The Secret History of Silicon Valley is often referred to as "the real story of how Silicon Valley started."

This conversation is part of a series on strategists and strategy devoted to the memory of one of the nation’s greatest national security strategists, Andy Marshall, the former director of the Pentagon’s office of net assessment and sponsored by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.