AI, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Venture Building: Reflections from Steve Blank’s Talk
- sofiajones1
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
The idea for this piece was sparked on 11 June 2025, when I attended the London Business School Summit series to hear Steve Blank speak. His frameworks on customer development, MVPs, and the business model canvas have shaped how ventures are built around the world.
The timing was perfect. For the past year I have been deeply exploring how artificial intelligence can accelerate venture development. At ChangeSchool, we began this work in April 2024 by creating a brain think group to experiment with AI tools across operations, marketing, and scaling. We also designed and delivered workshops for over 70 entrepreneurs, helping them map use cases for AI in building ventures. The question I keep asking is: how can founders use AI not just to make their work more efficient, but to fuel what Blank describes as “relentless execution”?
Hearing Steve Blank reflect on the changing landscape of entrepreneurship gave me a chance to connect his decades of experience with our experiments at ChangeSchool. Below are five key themes that struck me, and what they mean for entrepreneurs today.
1. Founders as Artists, Not Accountants
Blank opened with a simple but powerful line: founders are closer to artists than accountants. They see things others do not. They create something from nothing. This mindset is not about careful optimisation but about vision, resilience, and curiosity.
In practice, this means that founders must accept failure as part of the process. Like an artist whose canvas rarely delivers a masterpiece on the first try, entrepreneurs iterate, adjust, and sometimes start again. At ChangeSchool, when we have supported founders using AI tools, this same creative loop has been essential. For example, we have seen entrepreneurs use generative AI to rapidly test product narratives or simulate customer personas, discarding dozens of variations before finding one that resonates.
The lesson is clear: entrepreneurship is not a safe job; it is a calling. Those who treat it like a job are unlikely to endure the cycle of failure and renewal that every founder must face.
2. Culture Shapes Entrepreneurial Outcomes
Blank spoke candidly about culture. In Silicon Valley, failure is not career-ending; it is a badge of experience. His own story of losing $35 million and then being funded again illustrates this. Contrast that with cultures—whether in Boston, London, or many parts of Asia—where family expectations or social stigma make entrepreneurship appear reckless.
At ChangeSchool, we have seen similar dynamics with entrepreneurs we coach globally. In some contexts, founders need as much support in managing family expectations as they do in building a business plan. AI can play a role here too: by lowering the cost and speed of testing ideas, it reduces the financial and emotional risk of early failure. This, in turn, may make entrepreneurial paths more acceptable in cultures less tolerant of risk.
3. Entrepreneurship Without Capital Is Like Clapping with One Hand
One of Blank’s most striking lines was that entrepreneurship without risk capital at scale is like “clapping with one hand”. Ecosystems thrive not only because of smart founders, but because venture capital is available at the right stage and pace.
Yet Blank also noted that AI is changing the venture capital model. Building a large language model requires enormous capital, but building an application on top of one requires far less. This is spawning new classes of seed investors focused on smaller, faster experiments.
Many of the ventures we have supported do not need $50 million to begin. They need $50,000 to test whether AI can, for example, automate back-office functions or generate targeted marketing campaigns. As the funding landscape fragments, founders will need to be clear about their category of entrepreneurship—small business, lifestyle, scalable start-up, or intrapreneurship—so they can align with the right capital sources.
4. AI as a Force Multiplier for Blank’s Frameworks
Blank emphasised that AI is not replacing his core principles of customer development and iterative testing; it is accelerating them. He compared it to quantitative trading in finance: with enough data and the right algorithms, entrepreneurs can close the loop between hypothesis, experiment, and learning faster than ever before.
We have seen this in action. In one of our workshops, entrepreneurs used AI to generate hundreds of landing page variants overnight, then deployed them to micro-audiences for real-time A/B testing. What once took months now happens in days. The frameworks remain valid, but the cycle time has collapsed.
This acceleration also raises the bar. If AI can do in six months what once took two years, founders must be prepared to compete on execution speed and intensity. As Blank warned, you are not just competing with people in your city—you are competing with teams in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen who may be “sleeping under their desks”.
5. Extraordinary People Make Extraordinary Companies
Perhaps Blank’s most practical advice was on talent. In a scalable start-up, you do not fill job specs. You recruit extraordinary people—those 100x performers who can bend reality with their skills and passion. Settling for “good enough” signals that a company is drifting into corporate, not entrepreneurial, mode.
AI again intersects here. It can help identify extraordinary people faster by surfacing talent globally, automating assessments, and even simulating team dynamics before hires are made. But AI cannot replace the founder’s judgement about who is truly extraordinary.
Reflecting on Steve Blank’s talk, his principles remain timeless: resilience, culture, capital, execution, and talent. Yet AI is changing the tempo of all five.
For entrepreneurs, the message is not to abandon these foundations but to embrace AI as a force multiplier. The tools now exist to test faster, execute relentlessly, and scale with fewer resources. But the essence of entrepreneurship—the artistry, the calling, the resilience—remains unchanged.
At ChangeSchool, our mission is to help founders, intrapreneurs, and organisations harness these shifts. By embedding AI into venture development, we aim to make the complex simple and the difficult achievable. And as Blank reminded us, there has rarely been a more exciting time to be an entrepreneur.
Steve Blank is recognised as the founder of modern entrepreneurship, revolutionising startup building with the Lean Startup movement and customer development. Over 30 years, he founded or worked at eight tech startups, including E.piphany, with four going public. His global influence includes teaching at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and others, where his hands-on Lean LaunchPad curriculum shifted entrepreneurial education to real-world discovery. His methodologies underpin programs like NSF’s I-Corps, accelerating scientific innovation and training entrepreneurs. He authored 'The Four Steps to the Epiphany' and 'The Startup Owner’s Manual,' and was named one of Forbes’ 30 most influential in tech. Known for his belief that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, he has transformed startup practice and education, enabling innovators to test assumptions, learn from customers, and rapidly launch new ventures.
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