Freecubator

Steve Blank is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a guru. The serial entrepreneur turned writer and professor has a big theory: entrepreneurship is a skill that can be taught.
At Stanford and Berkeley, Blank teaches scientists to get out of their labs and find real customers for their ideas — without getting bogged down in the traditional MBA weeds of spreadsheets and revenue models.

The LinkedIn IPO “absolutely” marks the beginning of a bubble — and he thinks it’s going to be great. He likens it to the Netscape IPO in August 1995 that kicked off four years of boom times, but notes that this time VCs actually know how to build real companies with real revenue and profit.
Crazy investors — not geeks — are what makes Silicon Valley unique. Without the “crazy” financiers willing to take big risks in hopes of chasing “obscene” returns, the valley would just be “a bunch of smart scientists and entrepreneurs sitting in their labs and their garages.”
Microsoft will start to fail within six quarters. Blank put a timeline on Microsoft suffering the kind of huge loss that drove IBM to restructure itself back in 1993: six quarters from now. He thinks Steve Ballmer is a “miserable failure” and that the board should be blamed for not replacing him. He also suggests that buying Nokia and installing Stephen Elop as CEO might be a solution.
But Larry Page is doing the right thing at Google. By letting the geeks run the show, Page is following in the footsteps of one of the earliest Silicon Valley pioneers: Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s.

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the full interview.