#10 Part 1: Startup Playbook Silicon Valley Doesn’t Want You to Know
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I lost $35 million, which then was a lot of money. - Connects that. - Yeah. - Connects now. - And I had to call my mother, you know, and say, "Mom, I lost $35 million." And of course, being a Russian immigrant, English wasn't her first language, and she was still translating in her head. So she took a pause and then said, "Where'd you put it?"

I said, "No, I lost it. It's gone." I'm in Brazil. And then she said, "Oh my God, the country we came from is gone." And then she thought about it and said, "And her name's blank. You can't even change it." And I said, "No, the reason I'm calling you is the people who gave me the money just gave me another $12 million to do my next startup."

And the Silicon Valley part of the story is I returned a billion dollars each to those two investors. Welcome to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark on the world, where each week I'm interviewing some of the best creatives in business, tech, sports, entertainment to learn how they made their mark. You can watch episodes on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or X. Divot. This episode is brought to you by Salesforce.

Today, we're in Half Moon Bay, California with renowned entrepreneur, educator, and author Steve Blank. With over four decades of experience in Silicon Valley, Steve has founded or been part of eight startups. Some went IPO, some were acquired, some got shut down. But over the past 20 years, he's shifted into working on customer development. He laid the foundation for the Lean Startup methodology, influencing how millions of companies approach innovation.

Steve has authored the Startup Owner's Manual and Four Steps to the Epiphany, which revolutionize how companies test, iterate, and scale. His insights have shaped how governments, companies, universities, and especially me think about building companies. Steve's a professor at Stanford University, a senior fellow at Columbia,

He's taught at Berkeley and NYU, and he's advised the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. Hope you enjoy it. Tell us about this amazing space. Where are we? Well, you're at K&S Ranch, halfway between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. It was part of an original Mexican land grant, Ananuevo land grant. We're, I guess, the fourth or fifth owners there.

Since the Native Americans lived there. When did you move here? Let's see. We bought it in 98 I actually paid for it in 99 after the internet bubble It's now been 20 some odd years. I think since we built the house. How far are we from?

Stanford where you teach or so we're at the center of the valley 59 minutes I kind of say less than an hour from my office in Stanford and uh we're about 25 miles either side for half Bay or Santa Cruz why have you lived out here for 25 years you know it's very interesting I grew up in a 600 square foot apartment in in New York City my parents were immigrants and um

I still remember being eight years old, having some fantasy about being able to walk for an hour and still be in my backyard from eight years old. And I realized one day I can actually do it. So, you know, sometimes you follow your dreams. This for me was exactly where I wanted to be.

And of course, when we first bought it, there was nothing here. And all my friends said, well, why aren't you buying in like Woodside where it could be next to people or Carmel? And I said, no, the point isn't being next to people. The point is being not next to people and being a...

and being able to have some time to think and to write and enjoy the space. And this is a pretty unique part of the, the coast of California is pretty unique. And this part, this 45 air miles, over 45 miles between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz doesn't have a single stoplight, yet 8 million people live 15 air miles away. But only 2,500 families are on that coastal strip. - How is that possible? - Well, it turns out,

This stretch between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz has something pretty unique for California and pretty unique for probably the U.S. It's a combination of a stick, which is called the California Coastal Commission. There's something called the Coastal Act, which protects the 1,100 miles of California coast. But then there's the carrot, which is Peninsula Open Space Trust, which is a nonprofit which buys up

land from farmers and other landowners and turns it into either public space or sells it back to the farmers with conservation easements on it. But the third piece, which they did, which is incredibly unique, is they helped start a

a county-funded organization called Mid-Penisola Open Space District, so they could post, could buy the land, sell it at 50% discount to Mid-Pen, which then turned it into parks. And so they were recirculating the cash, and at the same time, the farmers knew they weren't going to be able to build condos or massive development here because of the Coastal Commission. And that's why the California coast mostly still looks undeveloped.

Now, the bad news is that makes it the socialist state of California, because anywhere else in the world you could extract maximum economic value of whatever you own and bought. I mean, Texas being the other extreme, the coast of California being this extreme, which said, no, the Coastal Act said that the coast, at least the things in the coastal zone, are actually to be shared for the other 40 million people of the state of California.

That really is a very different worldview from, gee, I own my property and I can do anything I want. And that's created constant tension between, you know, no, you can't tell me what to do versus, no, this is, you know, a resource for everybody. When you come to this property, I sort of equate it to like going out...

Mount Sinai or something. It's like this, it's this pilgrimage to get here. You drive through from the valley, through the hills, down along the beach. You kind of are lost for a while. Then you eventually find it. And then you, you come up the fork in the road,

up the hill and this there's some sort of magical energy here I feel like because so many incredible startup ideas have been formed here and molded and shaped here that have benefited millions of startups and entrepreneurs was it intended that way or well I think our time is over since I can't summarize it any better than that no of course it wasn't intended that way it was intended like I just

You know, one of the things when I retired was a set of conscious decisions and a set of unconscious decisions. And the conscious decision was, you know, I had done startups for 21 years, 24-7. And, you know, for those of you watching, you understand that, you know, doing a startup is not a halftime game. You're 120% committed to it.

But I had been lucky enough or maybe not lucky enough to see some of my mentors, people I really respected at work, have feet of clay at home, meaning they gave it all at work, but their kids grew up hating them because they didn't spend any time with them and thought maybe a three-day weekend was like that time. And when I got lucky enough during the last bubble, I realized my kids were seven and eight years old, and while we were doing long vacations and whatever,

I didn't want to do that again. I wanted to see them grow up. And so step one was realizing what enough was.

And enough was, gee, my parents were immigrants and like I now had enough, at least for me and my family and my kids and their kids and multiple kids. And I wanted to hang with my family. That was one. Two is I needed to figure out, OK, if I'm going to retire, what do I want to do next? And and like most people or maybe not like most people, I realized I didn't want to jump into something. There was a.

That's an interesting story of how Tesla started in my office, or with JB Straubel. But I realized, well, just as a sidebar, the test for me was did I want to do another one or hang with my kids? And the other test of did I want to do another one is now that I was

quote successful could I jump on a red-eye for coffee with someone in New York or would I go send someone else or go well do it on a phone call

And when I decided, nah, I don't have to do that anymore, I realized I would be competing with the me 10 years earlier who would in a second jump on a red-eye just for a coffee. So number one is, well, I had the passion. I didn't have that same drive. And two is the pull for figuring out what was next, particularly putting family first, was pretty important. How do you figure out when enough is enough?

You know, for me, enough was to be comfortable to, you know, my test was being able to afford to buy any library book or any book I wanted without thinking twice about, oh, there's a hardcover, I could buy it. But seriously, being able to pay off mortgages and, like, not have to work if I didn't want to work, which, again, for a type A is kind of impossible. You trade one type of work for another. But, you know...

So enough for me was kind of those criteria. Did I need a salary or could I figure out what to do next? There's a question you ask yourself over time is, do you live to work or are you working to live? And those are very two different mindsets, right? As an entrepreneur, I got divorced when my wife asked me, what's more important, me or your job?

And we realized the marriage was over when I was still spending a minute and a half thinking about the answer. Back then, it was like I was living to work in a family relationship for a second. You know, older and wiser, I realized, well, that was a pretty dumb answer. I still should have been married. But...

But over time you realize that no, work is great and you can enjoy it, etc. But that's not your life. If that's your entire life, you're kind of missing a lot of much more interesting things going on around you. Especially in startups because they almost all fail. And so if you put every ounce of everything you have into this business, which we do, but literally everything, I find that a lot of people, when they get to the end of that road and it completely falls apart,

there's nothing there for them. Well, I'll disagree a bit because to me the founder personality is closer to an artist than any other profession. Why is that? If you think about artists, artists see things that other people don't. The apocryphal story is somebody visiting Michelangelo's studio and seeing a 12-foot block of marble. And they go, what's this? And Michelangelo goes, it's a 12-foot block of marble. That's what they're looking at. But he says,

Can't you see it's the most beautiful statue in the world, sculpture in the world? And they go, it's just a 12-foot block of Markham. And he says, come back in three years. Guy comes back in three years, it's the Pieta. It is the most beautiful sculpture in the world. And they go, how did you do that? And he said, I just removed the marble around it.

That's what founders do. Founders have a vision and they execute because they see with absolute clarity, at least the ones that are great at seeing through what I call the fog of war, they know where they're going. Now, we have enough data now to say that 100% of founders think they're visionaries, but the data says about 98% are hallucinating.

But you would never do art or create music or write a play or write a book if you thought that it was going to be crummy art or crummy books or no one would listen to the song. Yet most music sucks, right? Most things fall on the floor and most whatever. But you're driven by that passion for creation.

And that's what great true founders do. They don't do it for the money, though now we figured out we could do it for passion and make money. But you do it because you want to create something and you have this built-in resilience and tenacity that when failure happens, it's a natural consequence of like what that art you're doing and you'll get up and do it again. It doesn't mean that failure is good. Anybody who tells you that has obviously never failed.

Well, but the fact that you do it multiple times means you're as close to an artist. And people have confused that for decades, thinking, oh, you're kind of like a business person or you're like an accountant. You know, teaching entrepreneurship is like teaching income statement, balance sheet and cash flow. No, it's like teaching art.

That's my theory. - So the end of a startup is sort of the end of an art project? It's the end of a creative process? - You bet. And now you see whether somebody wants to hang that thing in the gallery or put it in the trash.

or whether anybody likes the real world analogy to that, what is putting my business in the trash or in the art gallery. In a startup, it's like some liquidity event, right? It's you've grown something or your product's in the hands of millions of people or you created a drug or something that has now saved lives or changed something. Whether it's a

technical product or something else and the trash means you know it's chapter 11 and they're selling off the furniture and you get to press for three weeks and like until your friends take you out for coffee and their first question is so what are you doing next

And the nice part about the ecosystems, not just Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley's in general, is the culture now allows you to do that. Unlike other countries or places, they don't run you out of town or people don't come after you with a baseball bat for paying them back. We've built this ecosystem where, in fact, people will fund things that are risky. I read recently in China that

the government was making founders guarantee as the funding that they take from investors that they had to personally guarantee it, which you can imagine what happened. - So it's really easy to strangle innovation in its crib. We for a while, and we'll see if it's sustainable, have put together an ecosystem of risk capital. It was not called venture capital at first, it was called adventure capital, which was a more accurate description of what it is.

I mean, think about it. Unlike bank loans or anything else where people want those guarantees, they want to see your P&Ls and they want to see, you know, whatever. And do you have a sustainable business? And where'd you go to school? And like, were your parents signed this note for you? I mean, here we give out checks for tens of millions of dollars to 20. I still remember the first check I got for like $10 million. I looked at the VC and I was Catherine Gould. I said, Catherine, what's to stop me from going to Brazil?

She said, "Because you're stupid enough to want to do a startup with it." And she was right. I would never think of taking the money and going, I was good. I thought what's the best thing to do is sleep under the desk 24/7 and try to build something. That is like what happens. Think about the billions or now close to 100 billion a year we give away.

How much fraud is there at least on the front end of thanks for the check, I'm going to some country you'll never heard of with the money? I mean, I read about it a lot. It happens, but you don't read it. But what we're giving it to people who can't think of the most exciting thing to do is not run away and sit on the beach. It's to build something important.

Isn't that great? I mean, what a great ecosystem. Because people confuse entrepreneurship with just the entrepreneurs. That's an ecosystem of one-hand clapping. It doesn't work. What you really have is risk capital that matches. And I'm not talking about seed capital. I'm talking about the whole venture capital system that emerged starting in the mid-1990s.

in essentially the mid-70s, even though there were science experiments all the way through the late 50s that matched that kind of innovation. That combination of entrepreneurs, ecosystems, and capital still only exists in maybe 10 or 15 places in the world. Not that entrepreneurs don't exist now everywhere. It's that where can you raise $100 million? It's sort of like you have one side of the equation but not the other side. Yes. Where can you raise $100 million? How many cities?

Maybe 10, maybe 20. I mean, not every city. But nowadays, the internet, so a couple of things changed the 21st century that allowed entrepreneurship to be everywhere. One was this notion of Amazon Web Services, computing as a utility. So if you wanted to build software, you no longer needed a computer. You just needed a laptop.

Two is this idea that there was actually a methodology to build a startup. My work, Eric Ries' work, Osterwalder's work, others. It wasn't just some random whatever. Three is the internet made this information available everywhere. So entrepreneurship is now everywhere, but risk capital and seed capital is almost everywhere. But capital at scale, still a few places. Let's talk about that customer development work and methodologies and the thing that you

figured out is you sort of put the pieces together of what is the equation towards having a chance at building a business model.

What is product market fit? You know, if you remember, I did eight startups. And basically, the advice you would get from an investor at the time, I don't think I ever heard this exact phrase, but the advice was, startups are nothing more than a smaller version of a large company. So do everything a large company does. What did that mean? Well, give us your five-year plan.

And by the way, large companies hire sales and marketing and engineering. And on day one, we want you to do that. Large companies have first customer ship dates and we just funded your idea. So we want you to go to work and build that idea. And back then in the 20th century, the method you used was called waterfall engineering. You had a spec.

I got the money because I told you what I was going to build. We gave a specification to engineering. They locked people in a room with caffeine and sugar and whatever, and a couple of years later, a product would come out. And you used to think, is the building big enough to hold the bags of money that would come? And we kept being surprised when it didn't quite work like that. But enough of it worked anyway that VCs kept doing this because they kept making money when no one realized that startups weren't smaller versions of large companies.

It's a big idea. I was the first one to say that. It's that, no, you're wrong. We do very different things. But all the books and language, particularly the language, was all associated with building something at scale that already existed. And what I realized was large companies execute known business models. Startups search for business models. And no one had ever articulated that distinction between search and execution.

We had built a hundred years of tools and techniques and methods at Harvard and McKinsey and whatever about execution. But we forget what the word MBA means. Remember what MBA stands for? What does it stand for? Masters of Business Administration.

We were training a cadre of people to administer existing businesses. That is, you built a business, now I need a management class that knows about organizational design, about hiring, about finance or whatever. But it wasn't about starting businesses. It was about administering. And there was nothing wrong with that. It was actually what the country needed as our companies were scaling. We didn't have a professional management class.

But we assumed that startups somehow just started from seeds in the ground or you know the stork brought them or whatever that there were no special tools or ways to think and that was the that was the break I made with the orthodoxy at the turn of the century which said no and I remember going to some professors at Stanford and in some unnamed business school and trying this idea and they said Steve I

I consult for a 100,000 person company. How hard could six people in a garage be?

And then I realized we're in two very different worlds. I had just spent 20 years with six people in a garage and they had never left the building. And by the way, that's now very different, right? Like almost everybody understands this distinction. So I started building tools and methodologies to help startups have different language, different thing. And I'm going to answer your question about product market fit. And the biggest idea was,

On day one, you might write a plan, but all that plan is, which again no one had ever described, is a series of untested hypotheses, which is a $20 word for you're mostly guessing about everything in that plan. And what was the most important things you were guessing about? You were guessing about who are the customers and what features do they want. And that combination of the customers and features is called product market fit.

And I said, there's no possible way that you could put that down on a piece of paper and know that by just writing about it.

why don't you get out of the building and test some of these assumptions about who the customers are. And if we build some early versions, including, you know, wireframes or PowerPoints or cardboard prototypes of the product, we could call them minimum viable product. And now we can actually test those with early customers. One of the things that you did that I've used so much over the years is what you talked about in the language. It's really put sort of

made a way of this sort of black magic of, hey, I'm going to do a startup and hey, I'm going to build something new. And, you know, the one phrase I find myself constantly talking to customers about is saying, hey, this is our hypothesis. What do you think? And then the other the other piece around

will you actually pay for it? - That to me is the killer. So you can do all this talking and that's a mistake is because I used to love to take the slides I was using to raise money and then just remove the last slide that said give me $10 million and change it to give me an order. Where instead, I didn't even understand the fundamental problems that I thought I was solving. Typically in Silicon Valley, though not always, we'll start with a hey, here's this neat tech and I can make it into this great product without ever asking

Do I understand any of the problems this product might be solving and for who? It doesn't mean you should stop worrying about the tech because that might be your passion. But to build a business out of it, you need the other side where you clearly understand if you show it to someone, are their pupils going to dilate and they're going to say, my boss has to see this? And then they're going to say, you can't leave this office until we have a deal? Or are they going to say, that's really interesting. Why don't you come back later? Right?

You will find those former if you try hard enough.

But sometimes you think, oh, we had a great meeting. Well, did I buy anything? No, they said to come back. No, you were thrown out politely. They didn't say your baby's ugly, but they really did. What you're looking for is those few people who either will tell you that you're on the target of understanding and solving a problem, or if you ask the right questions, they'll actually tell you what problem is important. But if you're trying to pitch a product,

You know, you've given them like no room to like give you some feedback. In your writings, you use this phrase that no business plan survives first contact with customers. And in the early days of being a business creator, an entrepreneur, an artist, uh,

That was really offensive to me because why wouldn't anyone, how could not everyone understand how innovative this idea is? You said every entrepreneur automatically assumes they're a visionary. And then I would go out and I would share this incredible vision and I would just get absolutely slammed to the ground. Or they would do what you said. They would kind of say, yeah, this is great. This is great. But I didn't ask them to pay for it.

So, you know what you just said, I have to tell you, I actually had a student and I have lots of copies with ex-students who said, "Professor Plank, you know, people are just not like buying what our business plan said." And I just like frustrated because they took the class. I said, "Well, why don't you just wrap a copy of your business plan with each product so they can read it?"

And they started taking notes. And I said, you know, I could go back and change your grade. I said, it's not about your plan. You're so embarrassed. You so missed the point. It was like, okay, send them the business plan. And listen, it's not like everybody's dumb. This is what we all did in the 20th century. That was the only thing we knew. Now that we have a different view, and by the way, I just want to emphasize that

The things I created, this whole methodology, A, it's obvious, right? It's obvious. All I did was put a language around it. And B, it's not the methodology. It's a method. You know, if there's a better method, go take it. If there's a pile of money in front of you, go take it. But if you don't have one, if you don't have a roadmap on how to build a company, this is probably a pretty good set of steps. And AI is going to change that. We could talk about that later, but AI is going to

rapidly change this as well. It is, that is, and that's the beautiful thing about building a business and it's also

incredibly frustrating and challenging thing because it is not a math equation. It is not perfect science. No math involved. There's no math involved. And that's a beautiful thing where you can be 19 or 20 years old or 25 or 30 or 40 and you can come create, you can paint your own canvas of what the business needs to be and the parameters that you want them to be. This is one of those, I don't know if you ever ran into make your own adventure. Sure, the books. Make your own adventure books. But here's something else I realized very early on

And in Silicon Valley, we don't talk about this much, but when I get out into the wider ecosystem, I do, because in other parts of the country and the world, they're confused about this. In Silicon Valley, we take for granted that you're going to build something big, because you're going to have to attract, if you want to attract venture capital money, you need something that will give you venture capital returns. That is hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in returns, because they want each deal to be half their portfolio or whatever it is. It's not like

I used to think, oh, I can make five million a year. Isn't that a great, that might be a great small business, but that's an impedance mismatch with the finances and the business model of VCs. So number one is I realized there's a taxonomy of entrepreneurs, meaning in Silicon Valley, we're looking for large scale entrepreneurs.

entrepreneurship and what's great is when you raise venture money and have a lot of capital you could attract the best and the brightest from around the world you could afford to do things you could use money for demand creation but 99.5 percent of all entrepreneurs in the United States are in small businesses

Small businesses can't raise venture capital money. Why? Because their returns aren't commensurate with what VCs are looking. They get bank loans or SBA loans, et cetera. They can't attract the best and the brightest, but they hire some competent people from the neighborhood and whatever. And their goals, like on day one, is I want to feed the family and maybe an extended family. And maybe later on they could decide they want to scale their business. Want to be my own boss. All of them have the, I want to be my own boss. That's what an entrepreneur is. They don't work for anybody else.

But the difference between small business entrepreneurship and venture scale entrepreneurship, very different. I mean, at least in terms of finances, who you could hire, scale, etc. And then there's corporate entrepreneurship. Boy, you're trying to do something innovative inside a large organization. Very different constraints in there. Wait a minute. Then in my last 10 years, it's entrepreneurship inside the U.S. government. Very different again.

Why? Because in the government, you're limited to what the law allows you to do, at least until this January, which we can or cannot talk about. But my point, and then there's nonprofit entrepreneurship. So the first thing I now...

ask entrepreneurs outside of entrepreneurial clusters is who are you and which rules are you following? Because the rules are slightly different from each. The customer discovery and validation parts are right, but the whole business model and the scale and the liquidity events are quite different.

There's sort of this trend for a while in Silicon Valley where we called businesses that weren't venture-backed lifestyle businesses. It was sort of like a slap in the face to anybody that built a business that had actual customers. Maybe it doesn't become a $100 million company, but maybe it becomes a $10 million company or it becomes a $20 million company. And you work with all your friends and you create the life experience.

that you want around you. But it feels like some of that with these waves of VC that have come through the Zerp era where lots of founders and companies raised a lot of funding and

Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't have. We had others whose sole mission is just raising funding, not getting to customers. And now with AI, we hear a lot of really smart people talking about how companies of the future could be started and run by a single company, the billion dollar company of the future. There's so much less capital needed for these companies. So I guess in the end,

which is the adventure that you should choose? Should you choose the path of small business lifestyle, build your 10, $20 million company, be profitable? - That's a great question, but it depends. A, you need to understand what those choices are, meaning, and what the trade-offs are.

Why I mentioned this taxonomy is that I still have students confused about, well, what's wrong with making $5 million a year? Stanford students confused. Stanford students confused. What's wrong with making $5 million? Nothing. It's a great business, for God's sake, $5 million a year. Most people in this country, let alone the world, would die for that. But don't be calling on Sequoia Capital for that. Once you understand, right?

what the goal of your investor is. So I tell people the minute you take money from someone, their business model now becomes yours. If you can't draw your investor's business model, you're at a loss on day one. You're gonna waste their time and your time. And so just to echo what you said, there's nothing wrong with each one of them, but you need to understand which world you're playing in and what the constraints of each one are. And by the way, there's huge constraints when you take venture money.

is that you're shooting for the moon or go home or you're gonna be the ex-founder. - Do I start at what kind of business I wanna run or do I start at what kind of life do I wanna have? Because as I hear you talk about, oh, well, I mean, you did eight companies, IPOing many, acquiring many,

I was crazy. Doing a lot of crazy things. Yeah, I was crazy. Okay, so I can- So if you're in your crazy, here's a heuristic. Do you have a family or any obligations? Swing for the fences. I mean, I'm just giving you, if you're asking for a set of rules, sure. If you have the inclination to take crazy things and you think you could see over the horizon, then take your biggest shot until you have obligations.

The second one is, if you can't see over the horizon, there's still a great role. You could be a co-founder and you could work with crazy people. Third is, you could be an early employee of something like that. So there's a hierarchy and of course the amount of ownership decreases exponentially or even more so if you're a founder or co-founder then you have most of the stock. If you're an early employee, fractional. Later employee, more fractional.

It used to be in Silicon Valley. You wouldn't start one when you were 20 years old. You would apprentice, like I did, and multiple until you saw how it was done because none of this information was available. In fact, you were limited by your coffee bandwidth if you happened to be in an innovation cluster. But nowadays, that information is available. And the capital is available. I mean, back then, no one would think about writing millions of dollars to a 20-year-old. Now, like a course.

So the first question is, what's your risk profile? Do you think you could do it yourself? Do you have any other obligations? Can you live on ramen for a while? You talked a little bit about failure. And I think in some ways it's really easy to say, hey, just...

You know it's coming here. We live in this unique place where failure is in some ways, it's kind of over-marketed. It's celebrated. - Yeah, who's ever celebrating it obviously never failed big. It's miserable. - It's terrible. - It's terrible. It's like the closest near-death experience I wish on anyone. On the other hand,

You know, there's a Bertolt Brecht quote that says that which does not kill me, makes me stronger. Or I think it came from some other philosopher, but he paraphrased it. And I think that's true. I just remember the biggest public failure I had was, you know, this thing called Rocket Science Games. I lost $35 million, which then was a lot of money. And I had to call my mother, you know, and say, Mom, I lost $35 million.

And of course, being a Russian immigrant, English wasn't her first language and she was still translating in her head. So she took a pause and then said, where'd you put it? I said, no, I lost it. It's gone. And then she said, like, oh my God, the country we came from is gone. And then she thought about it and said, and her name's blank. You can't even change it. I said, no, the reason I'm calling you is the people who gave me the money just gave me another $12 million to do my next startup.

And the Silicon Valley part of the story is I returned a billion dollars each to those two investors. And that's not a Steve Lang story. That's a Silicon Valley entrepreneurship cluster story. And by Silicon Valley, I mean other clusters. We get multiple shots at the goal here. That's really unique about an innovation culture.

is that if you didn't lie, cheat and steal and your investors still thought, yeah, you took an honest shot at it, we made the same mistakes, not just you. Okay, what do you got next? That's what happened to me. And that's why we're sitting in this place. But it did not feel good and it felt miserable. And the whole lean startup came from processing failure.

You know, the first thing that happens when that company failed is I went through like the 12 steps. You know, I went, no, it can't be happening. You know, the second one was like, you know, so first is disbelief.

And then it was like anger. And then it was like blame my co-founder, which, all right. But my business card said CEO. So there was like really not quite, yeah, I could blame my co-founder. But at the end of the day, if I like was really acting on my beliefs. And then it was like, okay, resignation. And then it was like a period of introspection. But the thing that I think benefited almost every entrepreneur was

was actually getting some insight from what happened. And what happened was, even though in my earlier startups I had listened to customers, what killed this one was Ubers.

I thought I didn't need to. I thought I was a successful entrepreneur. And because I was raising all this money and creating all this press, I was reading my press. It was a negative feedback loop. When I should have been talking to customers, I was generating press, which I needed to to raise money. But that was actually the wrong path. And my investors had been smarter. They would have also smacked me on the side of the head. But we all fell in that trap of, look how hot we are. So we were creating garbage for products.

Why? Because we didn't quite understand that we weren't in the technical business, we were in the hitspace business, which has nothing to do with technology. We were in the entertainment business, which I should not have been the CEO of. But extracting those lessons of getting out of the building, hubris is a company killer, too much money is a company killer, not understanding your customers,

And not calling foul when you realize it's going south. All those, I think, became part of the lean startup. And I executed every one of the lessons in the last company that returned a billion dollars each to the investors. But it was a painful set of lessons. But I don't think lean would have happened without that failure. But

But again, back to your point, anybody says failure in entrepreneur is like a thing you ought to do and whatever. No, no, but you will fail. Again, it's back to this artist thing.

If you knew you were only gonna get one shot and making a painting or a hit song like what do you think? What are you smoking? It doesn't work that way. Most of them are terrible. What about missed opportunities versus the things maybe? Yeah that you tried and failed What about things that you feel like you missed along the way that you should have jumped on? Well, how much time do we have? I missed a lot of opportunities, but you know

It's kind of like baseball or being a quarterback. You don't have a batting percentage of 1,000 and you don't have a... Nobody does. Yeah, and you don't, you know, quarterback doesn't make every pass. What you want to be is successful enough in the right time in the right place. I mean, you want to take enough shots at the goal. One of the heuristics about my career that others have said, and I lived it, is showing up more than most people counts for a lot.

What do you mean? I even remember this from the military. I just would raise my hand for things that people went, are you out of your mind? I mean, I volunteered to go to Southeast Asia. I volunteered to work some extra things to do here. And I got noticed. And people said, oh, who do we have for? Oh, blanks here. OK, here. Or like--

This story about how we got the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps funded is like when NSF financial people said, oh, we can't afford to fund it this year. Wait till next year. I flew to Washington and just showed up and cold called on congressmen until I found Congressman Lipinski, who decided to make it his mission from God to get this funded and scaled. And for 12 years,

He did. He was I-Corps' biggest proponent because I happened to just say, I'm not going to sit in my office. I'm going to fly to Washington and see if I can make something happen. I had no idea who to call on or whatever. But just making yourself present and getting engaged without getting annoying. But if you're not in the game, you don't get to play. When do you think is the best time to start a business in your life? Is it when you're young? Is it mid-age? Is it the latter part of your career? Yes.

So, when you have the passion, so people confuse starting something, and I mean not a small business, but a venture scale something, with a job. You know, doing a startup is not a job. It's the world's most miserable job, but it's the best calling.

And the difference between a job and a calling is really important. If you're not called to this, if you don't hear that voice in your head, and that voice could come at any time. It's like a calling from God. I don't mean to make it equivalent, but it is that thing that says, I need to do this. It's, again, that artist drive. Something really deep, driving you, pushing you. Yes.

into this very uncomfortable difficult space. - Because it's gonna be miserable. It's gonna be like, you're gonna make sacrifices, you're gonna miss things, you're gonna work harder than you've ever worked. And if you don't do that, then people who are doing that in your space are gonna run right over you. So you gotta give it a lot, but it has to be not because you think it's cool or whatever. And it doesn't have to be that little light bulb goes on in your 20s. It wasn't until I had practiced a bit with lots of others that I said,

Well, I could do this, but I never could have done it in my 20s. As I said, now my students have a lot more information than I did that some of them are more than capable of doing this. But it cannot be it's a cool thing to do.

The other part as I mentioned as you get older you have more obligations And you need to actually in the back of your head computing how long can my family you know live on robin and pay the mortgage and you know Put the kids through college forever. Yeah, it doesn't go on forever but

But you need to get it out of your system. When I started my first business, I was working at a video game company. And I was having the hardest time sleeping. I would be up at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I couldn't sleep. And then I just felt like these things is kind of what you describe. That's either indigestion or a startup passion. That's it, yeah. One of the two. Is he a doctor? You're a doctor or you need to start a company. There you go. And my wife...

told me one day that she was pregnant. And I said, I don't know what it was, but it's this voice inside of me said, this is the perfect time. This is the moment that you should jump because if you don't, you won't. And when I was leaving the company, they offered me this huge promotion and it was in the middle of the Great Recession and this huge salary increase. And

I sort of realized in that moment or this voice inside, whatever it was, said, "If you're not excited about this, you need to run away from it as fast as you possibly can, regardless of what's coming." And the next two years, it was like, I've looked back at my tax returns. We lived in someone's side house for free. We watched their kids. We made $10,000 the first year. We made $12,000. Maybe I had some cash business on the side. I don't remember. But we weren't making any money.

I was having so much fun. And it was like nothing I'd ever experienced, you know, being my own boss and having...

the artistry, being able to creatively do anything I want all day, every day. What is that worth? - Yeah, you're describing the passion of an entrepreneur, right? And it's the world's best time to do this. - Why do you say that? - Well, the amount of capital available is so silly for-- - Or maybe AI? - Yeah, well, number one, the amount of capital. - Just the sheer amount of available capital for,

Builders, you know, just remember the first venture funds were ten million dollars the funds and that not the checks When I first came out to the valley, I mean I was like You know a Series A which I remember getting was like four million dollars like my students get that as a pre-seed now it's kind of like yeah, there's inflation but what and then

AI, you know, we keep looking at AI today as like, oh, this race between ChatGPT and Grok and Google's version and Meta's and whatever. But we're really missing that conversation that's going on in life sciences or in material engineering or other places. What's happening there? Well, in AI, we basically have won two Nobel Prizes last year on protein folding and chemistry and physics.

We now have an arms race today. The latest version is Evo II, doing things that basically could design life, you know, proteins and complex stuff that are both frightening and just game changers for medicine in the next couple of years. So while we're at least a tech...

press is focused on the easy to understand piece. Consumer applications. Consumer applications. And listen, that's going to be a mind changer as well. But it's very funny. There's always been this disconnect. It's almost two parallel universes.

that occupy the same space because Silicon Valley has a large life science contingent kind of focused in South San Francisco. At the same time, it has hardware and software. Yet most of the press writes about the hardware and software just like the other part doesn't exist. But it is equally large and equally, and in fact now, being accelerated even faster by AI. And so to answer your question, AI is...

is changing everything, defense business, intelligence business, everything, depending on what tools you're using and how it's focused. I mean, whoever thought programmers would be out of a job? And if not this year, at least in the next couple of years, it's pretty clear that with some good prompt engineering and tools, you're going to be able to create what took a team of front-end, back-end developers to do. I mean, they're not going to be all gone, but a good number of them are going to be editing the AI's code, not writing stuff from scratch.

And so that will enable a whole new class of companies. It's going to be able to look at your financials and your books. And so all of a sudden, all the people you had in accounting will maybe be checking the AI's work rather than doing your books. Same with HR. Just imagine the whole lean methodology where instead of having to manually create a business model, you tell it what you're interested in. It comes up with a couple of alternate ones. And then you say, who should I talk to? And then it gives you its phone numbers and whatever. And then if you validate, human beings should be in that loop.

But then you say, create some artificial personas for me that I could run A/B tests against the personas and maybe check them with human beings because now I could create hundreds of personas. Wait a minute. And then say if I'm in e-commerce, create me 100 stub websites and artificially populate those with proxy products and see if I could create demand. So you can imagine a whole pipeline of AI first maybe with e-commerce and other spaces.

And that's the easy part to imagine. So, well, if we can imagine it today and see pieces of it, just imagine where it's going to be in three years. And you don't even need to interact. You can just talk. Right. You can just click a button and have this fully active conversation with this person. Listen, I use ChatGBT now all the time. When I'm writing a blog post, it does, at least for the way I write, does a horrifically bad job of writing my style because it doesn't at least have that deep knowledge.

But it can't get me to research places that I haven't thought of or some background that I now used to have to use Google and whatever. And some of the models are just good enough for being like a partner in doing this stuff. And in the intelligence business, it's just mind-blowing. What kind of impact do you think you've had?

entrepreneurship and why? What I did is basically remove the stone around the sculpture, right? And said, well, there's the piano, here's the lean method. And it turned out it was a pretty good way to think about it. But the real contribution was creating these set of classes, both at Stanford and those that became national programs.

This Lean Launchpad class became the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, DOE, and DOD I-Corps, taught in 100 universities in four countries. Hacking for Defense class, again, which took the same pedagogy, the same way to teach from the Lean Launchpad class, but instead of

scientists or students coming in with their own problems, we went out and go out to the Department of Defense Intelligence community and get their problems and have students pick which ones they want to work on as teams. It's now in 66 universities in three countries. It's part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Hacking for Education was started by Jennifer Carolyn of Reach Capital, being taught in the education school of how to create new courses. Hacking for Diplomacy is still being taught in a couple of universities.

We started the Gordian Knot Center. So all these things were kind of like, gee, how come no one's doing X? Okay. And what was nice is Stanford gave me the opportunity to do that inside of a group in the engineering school and now inside the what's called CSAC and the Freeman Spokely Institute on the policy side. But being able to make a

and impact was kind of the one of the best things i could have done in retirement i after i launched my first startup uh i raised a small amount of money on it and it was an ipad game it's right as the ipad came out and we built it and we launched it about nine months later and

the Engadget and Gizmodo, these people who are writing about all these kinds of startups, they came out and said that we had the best app ads they'd ever seen. It was the best marketing they'd ever seen. I had come out of electronic arts. I was a product manager. I knew how to market a video game. We were beating our chest. We couldn't have been more excited. And then as soon as people played the game,

I know the story. All right. Well, I forgot the key ingredient to making games is it has to be fun. Right. And that's the hardest thing in the world to build, I think. And remembering you're in a hit space business, right? Yeah. And building a hit, it's very different than building a tech. And we launched a game and it was this huge failure. And I went and couldn't get out of bed for three weeks. And then somebody gave me your book, Four Steps to the Epiphany. And I'm reading this book and I'm turning the pages and

and I'm just like smacking my head. And the biggest thing I realized was if I had just had this book before, if I had just had this methodology before, I would have been smart enough to know that I would have understood that I needed to make sure I had a product that people wanted to use before I marketed it or went out there and showed it to the world. And I told you this one time years later, and you said to me, "If you hadn't failed, you would have never grasped the concept."

And it's in that failure that led to other successes. - Well, thank you. It's very funny you say that because

I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany not because I was writing that book. I was writing a set of lessons learned about all the, I thought, gee, when I retired, what the world needed was my memoirs. I started writing literally here's what happened in Company to Company and realized that there was a pattern here that I had never recognized, just like you finally recognized it. And I never would have recognized it unless I had failed.

And so I stopped writing the book at page 80 and started going back and extracting those lessons, which became customer development, customer validation, company creation, and company building, and put it in a book called The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was the first time all these ideas, which I said people were doing, but it never had the words or language to describe them. And then...

About five or maybe seven years later, I followed it up with a startup owner's manual, which was actually a playbook of how to do this, where Four Steps to the Epiphany was more of a philosophy, and here's kind of how to think about each one of the steps. And then in between, I sat on...

I had known Eric Ries when he was an engineer in something called there.com and then wrote the first check to him and Will Harvey for what was called IMDview. Eric became the first practitioner of essentially customer development and in fact

basically pointed out to me that we no longer use waterfall we used agile engineering and it was a perfect complement to Basically customer development and so Eric became the first practitioner of this at IMVU and then I discovered Alexander Osterwalder's work on the guy who did something called the business model canvas and the sum of

You know, customer development, agile engineering, and the business model canvas became what we call the lean startup, at least what I call. It's those three components, which the canvas gives you the scorecard of the things you ought to worry about. Customer development gets you out of the building, and agile engineering gets you to build MVPs as quickly as possible. Except my only difference was...

MVPs, at least in Eric's world, thought of as the minimum viable product. For me, what I discovered was once you're using a business model canvas, an MVP is something that gets you the most learning at any point in time. It could be a draft price list. It could be like a draft spec for a clinical endpoint.

It could be a wireframe of a product, but it's not necessarily a minimum viable product. Does that make sense? And so once you think about the entire business model, then MVP is whatever experiment I want to run at the time to make me smarter about how to optimize my business. One time I came up here and I had this great idea for a business and I called you.

And I was like, I got to come show this to Steve. He's going to just think this is the greatest thing he's ever seen. I don't remember, but I know how the stories usually start. He's shit all over my idea. And so I make the pilgrimage. I drive all the way up here. And I came in and I told you about what it was. And you listened and you were super kind and patient and benevolent. And at the end of it, he said,

"You know, I just don't think anybody's... I just..." He said it in a nicely funny way, "I don't share your hypothesis." And you said, "Look, if you can get 10 people..." That's my line. "To write you a check for what you've just described, I would be happy to assist you in building this business."

But why don't you go do that work first? And I drove out of here and was like, let's go. I got this. And I started getting on calls, which I had been on, but I'd never asked for the money. And when I started asking people for money, it was like we thought it was worth $1,000, this product that we were offering. And so the people said, yeah, I mean, I think that sounds fair. We're like, okay, well...

And the thing you had taught me to do was tell them to write a check and send it to you and that you won't cash it. You'll put it in an envelope in a desk and when the product ships that you'll cash the check. But if you don't ship the product, you'll never cash the check. So there's very little risk for them. So I started saying, would you write a check today for that $1,000 you just said is a reasonable request?

And then it got really quiet on the phone. And then the people were like, well, no, that's not, I don't really, I don't really like it that much. I said, no problem, because you would prepare me for this. They're probably not going to like your price, so just take a lower price or, you know, try that. And then if they don't say that, then ask them what it's worth. So I said, well, how about $500? They said, well, I'd never pay $500. I said, no problem. What would you pay for it?

Today, if you were writing a check today, what would you pay for it? And I'll never forget this entrepreneur that was on the other side of the phone. He got really quiet. He said, I'll pay you $20 a month. And the service we were offering was, we thought was worth way more than a thousand. That was our low estimate. We were doing so much work for them and he only recognized $20 worth of value. And I knew at that point I was never coming back up here with a check.

I didn't even get one check and so we didn't do it. Or you could have asked the next question. Yeah, what did I mess up? I forgot to tell you the next question. What would be worth $1,000 a month? Because you're already in a conversation. So they told you this baby's ugly, but do you have another baby? No, sometimes. And here's what's really interesting. If you had sent a salesperson out to ask those questions, you would have shut down the company. But now you're the founder.

And this is something where startups get wrong because they think that you could have customer discovery with salespeople. But I've learned when they say, well, no, we wouldn't pay anything. You go, well, listen, since we got another 15 minutes, can I have another minute? What is your biggest problems? What are you spending money on? What are you trying to piece part together? And it might be nothing that you could do. I'm going to tell you what had four IPOs for me.

when they said, we'd pay anything if you could do X. Say that again? We'd pay anything if you could... Four IPOs.

You built four companies from the ground up that went to IPO by asking a customer. Well, no, a couple of them we were doing that, but the other two we pivoted when we heard we'd pay anything if you do X. Well, we were kind of, but we were like maybe 45 degrees off, right? So not only when they say no, you're already in their pants. They already told you they're not going to buy this stuff. But here's the point. You're the founder.

You have the ability to go back and tell your co-founder, "I've now heard this five times. We're still building the same thing you as the VP of Engineering want to build.

But you want to come out and hear what I'm hearing, right? And you take your partner who is ever also responsible for making those decisions and just say, am I like hallucinating or are they saying they pay anything here? And now you hear that, not once, once doesn't matter. You now take that once and you go say, can I find five more? We'll pay in or whatever the number is. There's a lot of jobs as entrepreneurs.

the CEO or the business owner that you can outsource. And then there are certain jobs. And this is one of them. You cannot outsource under any circumstance. And people make the mistake of, oh, discovery, that's great. I'll just take that input from my VP of sales or head of revenue or chief revenue officer. That's too early in the process.

Until you've found a repeatable and scalable business model, I don't want a head of sales in the way of maximizing learning. Because a head of sales can only report back to the founders, hey, your product sucks. What do you think the founder's first reaction is going to be? What do you think? What would you say? Your product sucks. I'd say you probably didn't hear him right. That's right. You're not explaining it correctly. And if they come back three or four times, what do you do to that VP of sales?

You fire them. You fire them. You fire them. But now all of a sudden it's substitute you out there. And now you're hearing your baby. You're on the front lines. And cognitive dissonance first is coming out of your smoke, out of your ears because you're thinking they just don't get it. So you go to another couple of people and if you're a great founder you'll go,

I might be missing something here. And then you start asking those questions about, well, maybe I didn't understand. I thought your problem was X. What really are your problems? Listen, tell me anything. Well, you know, is it like you think you're building it for finance, but it's really an HR issue where it's a technical thing or regulatory thing? You know, you sort of instinctively know the right questions to ask and you don't have this baggage of like, I'm going to lose my job. Yes. It's like, it's your company. It's a company we're going to lose. I'm going to lose everyone's jobs if I don't figure this out. Yes.

Now, meantime, you might have a VP of engineering co-founder, if that's not you, building product X. So you need to bring them around. And the way I found... They need to hear it, too. They need to hear it. You cannot go back into that building and say, hey, I have attention deficit disorder. Here's what I heard from one person. What you need to say is, look, I need your help here. I'm hearing something very different. I need you to come out with me to just make sure I'm not like...

like hearing the wrong thing, 'cause I've now heard this, you gotta hear it at least three times, at least for the enterprise. If you haven't heard it three times, don't panic your team. And that's the other mistake I saw founders make is, oh, I've heard something different, so now, so lean and customer development is not an excuse for attention deficit disorder.

That is, you don't want to run back in the building and say, here's what I heard. We need to change our strategy. You want to have enough evidence. So I call this evidence-based entrepreneurship. In the enterprise, when you're selling million-dollar products, hearing it three or four times is good enough with checks. In a web app, well, if I don't have thousands of people

saying X three or four times, doesn't matter. So the amount of data and evidence you need makes sense. It has to match the business model. And I've been accused sometimes of running this process and going in with customers myself and saying, why are you micromanaging this? Why are you micromanaging this? Well, I have to hear it. And there's some frequency with a customer. It's like the siren sound on the ships. And when you hear it, you know

I don't know, I don't think I could hear it in the early years of being a CEO. It's just a practice to you. But after a while, you can recognize the signs and you can recognize how people write in an email about if they really have the problem, how they respond, how they think about it, how they talk about it, how many people they put in the meeting, how many people they don't put in the meeting. There you go. I got to tell you a funny story. When I retired,

I used to get called by a bunch of VCs. One of them was a woman named Catherine Gould who became a board member and then became a real friend. At first, Catherine would call me in when she said, "Hey, Steve, these companies have some marketing problems. Can you go in and see what they are?" I was kind of naive. I'd go in and listen and the VP of sales would say, "Oh, yeah. Marketing sucks and marketing..."

And then I talk to the CEO, what's the problem? We're not making our numbers. Oh, well, okay, why is that a marketing problem? And then I realized that, like, well, wait a minute, they're not making their numbers and the VP of sales is blaming it on marketing. And I go, well, are any of the salespeople making their numbers? Oh, yeah, or one in Boston is. I said, well, send me the slide deck that one in Boston is using.

I said, "Well, what do you mean? We have a corporate deck." I said, "Well, they're obviously not using it." And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "No, no." And he sends me the deck and it's completely different. And I realized that the salesman in Boston himself, back then it was him, basically had figured out product market fit in spite of corporate market that was sitting in the building and not getting out and talking to customers. And so my advice to

The VC was, "You need to fire all the salespeople except the one in Boston and get rid of your marketing department and the CEO needs to get out and do customer development." Because they scaled prematurely. They had 12 salespeople all executing obviously a strategy which didn't match what the customers needed, yet there was evidence that there was business there. Does that make... And then, of course, the first time I suggested it, she kind of laughed.

Six months later, he said, Steve, we fired all the salespeople. And so now, so I basically did three or four more of these, but I didn't even have to visit the company. I would say, send me the slide decks. And you could see what this was something I call premature scaling. That a lot of companies assume that the thing you need to do is scale sales.

before you have found product market fit, right? It's in our plan. We're going to hire all these salespeople. Well, do you have any evidence that sales are going to scale? No, no. Our plan says we're going to burn all this cash. Well, why don't you show me that the plan for revenue is matching the expense plan? Anyway, I always found that kind of funny is that you almost could do as your point, right? You now have enough

enough insight that there's a set of heuristics you consciously or unconsciously could look at a meeting or who shows up or whatever. My tell was like, oh really? Is anybody selling? Well, is it the corporate marketing stuff? No, he made it up himself. He figured out product market fit, but the rest of the company had it. If you want to get people to get on the ship with you and you want to get people to understand what you understand,

In my experience, the fastest way to do that is to play a video of a customer. And that could be an investor, that could be a potential team member. And with software today, I mean, everyone records every sales call. It's so easy. And then I've been in these meetings with investors where they're just kind of like literally looking at their phone while you pitch. And then you start to show a customer video and they start to listen and hear somebody with the actual pain talk about it. And it's like,

It changes everything. They get it. They start leaning in and start sitting up. Everything changes it. It's not something you can outsource. It's not something you can hire a consultant to go do for you. There's still a famous audio recording made from one of our customers at Epiphany that still gets played around today when people ask, what does product market fit sound like? It was the CFO of

of a company that Microsoft eventually bought, I'm blanking on their name, who was basically calling our VP of sales after they had used our MVP, and he goes,

Oh my God, I'm gushing. This changes everything. Wait till our CEO sees it. And we still use this as like, you want an example of product market fit? That's an example of what product market fit sounds like. Anyway. I had a pitch that I did one time and I found out later, they're one of our very, very first customers for a product. And I was pitching them and I found out later that the CMO put the call on mute

And he said, can we just end this and give this guy the money? And when you hear that, you know something's different. Right. And then what you need to find is, is this repeatable? My definition of a startup, which, by the way, also had never been articulated, startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. And if you parse that, number one is a surprise to a lot of startups. The goal of a startup is not to be a startup.

If you have a startup, it's a temporary organization, you want to be a scalable large company. Search, not execute. So all of a sudden it goes, well, what's search? That's the get out of the building stuff, that's the building MVPs, etc. For repeatable, not just I got one hot order, but I have actually found a way that's repeatable, not just by the founders, and scalable, where $1 in equals $N or users or customers or something,

business model, not just product market fit, but all the other pieces.

So now all of a sudden we have an actionable definition that if you get everybody in the company to understand, then we could get everybody aligned about the mission. Mission isn't about engineering or marketing or sales. It's to build a repeatable and scalable business model. And our goal isn't to be a startup. Our goal is to be something where we could hire MBAs to administer. It's a transitory position. You don't want to stay here. You want to go. Right. And here's how we're going to do it. Searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.

And that organization cannot look like the organization at scale. That organization early on is why we think of startups as scrappy and agile and whatever, because they're doing different things. They're searching, not executing. Eventually, you go into execution mode. Divot. On next week's episode...

I was running the marketing department and like we went around the room talking about what people believe. And finally, I said, everybody go get your business card. Back then you had these little cards with paper on it with the title. And I said, mine says CEO. I don't care whose opinion you have in the room. My opinion trumps everybody. But anybody who brings in a fact gets to overrule my opinion. So why don't we start having fact-based meetings rather than faith-based meetings?