Steve Blank Podcast

The DoW urgently needs to organize its scattered subterranean warfare assets into a single unified organization. Ideally, a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager (DRPM) for Subterranean Warfare, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of War. (The Department already uses this model for unmanned systems, critical weapons and Golden Dome.) This group would have three portfolios: Subterranean Resilience, Subterranean Sensing and Subterranean Defeat. The office would integrate validated requirements, experimentation, testing, acquisition, and fielding.

This is a four-part series on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

This is the third of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

This is the second of four posts on how AI has impacted our Lean LaunchPad class and what we did about it.

15 years ago, my Lean LaunchPad class changed how entrepreneurship is taught. The class is now taught in hundreds of universities worldwide and helped launch thousands of startups. But this past summer, I got thinking about whether AI killed our Lean LaunchPad class, and with it the Lean Startup and Customer Development.

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford.

In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups.

Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford.

This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than the previous classes.

For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event – the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. It’s possible that the first cybersecurity apocalypse may have come early.

This is the 16th year we’ve been teaching the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. This year, from the first hour of the first class, we realized we were seeing something extraordinary happen. It was both the end and beginning of a new era.