Bob Dorf

Bob Dorf is among the most knowledgeable Lean Innovation and Customer Development experts on the planet, second only to Steve Blank, who developed the methodology and spent a decade extending and refining it. Together with Steve Blank, Bob published The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, the seminal text outlining every step of the lean customer development process. After two years of near-fulltime research and writing, it became Amazon.com’s #1 Business/Entrepreneurship bestseller, with some 400,000+ copies in circulation in more than 17 languages worldwide.

Bob has trained and coached scores of established companies, and literally more than 1000 startups. He’s worked with GE, Merck, NewsCorp, and Carvajal SA; and intimately with six established, growing Latin American Companies in the ECLA program at Columbia Business School, where he’s an Entrepreneur in Residence. In his world travels, he’s coached scores more on behalf of the governments of Colombia, Mexico, Russia and the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, which he’s keynoted four times. His coaching focus centers around refining and optimizing business models(often with “pivoting”) and particularly on scaling sales and marketing activities(which has been the heart of his 40-plus year startup career).

Entrepreneurial from the age of 12, Bob received his last W-2 some 40 years ago, when he left a great news editor’s job at WINS Radio in New York to launch his first startup. Since then, he has personally founded seven companies, including—as he puts it—“two homeruns, two base hits, and three solid tax losses.” His 27 personal investments included 7 IPO’s, six colossal failures, and–­as he puts it—“everything imaginable in between.” here’s shorter. edit as needed…

Bob Dorf is among the most knowledgeable Lean Innovation and Customer Development experts on the planet, second only to Steve Blank, who developed the methodology and spent a decade extending and refining it. Together with Steve Blank, Bob published The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, the seminal text outlining every step of the lean customer development process. After two years of near-fulltime research and writing, it became Amazon.com’s #1 Business/Entrepreneurship bestseller, with some 400,000+ copies in circulation in more than 17 languages worldwide.

Bob has trained and coached scores of established companies, and literally more than 1000 startups. He’s worked with GE, Merck, NewsCorp, and Carvajal SA; and intimately with six established, growing Latin American Companies in the ECLA program at Columbia Business School, where he’s an Entrepreneur in Residence. In his world travels, he’s coached scores more on behalf of the governments of Colombia, Mexico, Russia and the Global Entrepreneurship Congress.