Company Building as Shakespearean Tragedy

Steve Blank, Stanford University

Silicon Valley lore includes anecdotes of company founders being thrown out of their own companies. But starting a company and growing a company are two different skill sets, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. Investors are often frightened away by world class entrepreneurs who know how to build, but not deepen and enrich, a later stage enterprise. The tragedy, says Blank, is that the largest, best-known tech companies are still run by their founders – think Microsoft, Oracle, or Apple. The gap in this insight, says Blank, is of theatrical proportion.