Relationship to Blank
Eric Ries is Steve Blank's most important intellectual heir — the person who took Customer Development and synthesized it with agile engineering and lean manufacturing concepts to create the Lean Startup methodology. Blank was an investor in and advisor to IMVU (co-founded by Ries), and insisted that IMVU executives audit his UC Berkeley entrepreneurship class. Ries also copyedited an early version of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany."
Career
Ries studied computer science at Yale University. Before IMVU, he worked at There Inc., a 3D virtual world company. He co-founded IMVU in 2004 and served as CTO. At IMVU, he applied Customer Development principles in combination with agile engineering practices, developing what would become the Lean Startup methodology.
He published "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" in 2011. The book became a New York Times bestseller, has sold over 1 million copies, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. It brought the methodology to a mainstream business audience far beyond what Blank's "Four Steps" had reached.
Ries later founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), an SEC-registered stock exchange designed to encourage long-term thinking in public companies.
What Ries Added
Ries' synthesis combined three elements: 1. Customer Development (from Blank) — the process for validating business models 2. Agile Development — the engineering approach for iterative product building 3. Lean manufacturing concepts — minimum viable product (MVP), validated learning, build-measure-learn loop
Ries' key additions to Blank's framework include:
Significance
The Blank-Ries relationship is one of direct intellectual transmission: teacher to student, methodology to movement. Blank created the framework; Ries made it accessible and actionable for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers. The relationship is explicitly acknowledged by both parties.
Sources: Wikipedia (Eric Ries), "The Lean Startup" (Ries, 2011), steveblank.com