Well hero might be a bit strong, but the guy can write!   Who the hell is Sean Fioritto and why is he my hero?  

1)  I don't know Sean from Adam

2) The guy just started blogging and you can follow @ twosixes.es

But here's his 2nd post and it's based on the opinions of another hero...... (Sean's) a guy name Steve Blank author of The Four Steps to Epiphany. 

Here's his blog post: 

If you dream of someday moving to California and renting a shitty apartment so you can crank out code for sixteen hours a day and eat ramen noodles for three months, all for a stack of ten thousand dollar bills you could likely create in less time at your job working just eight hours a day, then hello, nice to meet you, my name is Sean and I am also crazy. If you’ve heard of YCombinator then you read Hacker News, and if you read Hacker News then you love reading blogs about startups. At some point sifting through the pile of startup news you came across Eric Ries and the Lean Startup, and you probably have an opinion. My sense is the Hacker News community is a bit wary; the Lean Startup seems like stuff we’ve already heard from our hacker heroes but packaged up in a suspiciously shiny Brand. I’m here to tell you: ignore the Lean Startup at your own peril. But if you can’t see through the halo of marketing bullshit to the nuggets of genius underneath, let me help you out.

Way back in 2006 I, (somewhat miraculously), completed college and majored in Computer Science and Entrepreneurship. Actually, I didn’t _quite_ major in entrepreneurship, but I still say I did because it’s easier than explaining the technical details of my degree. Back then the sheen hadn’t yet worn off dot-com bubble culture, at least not in academia. We sure did make fun of those startups that went belly up; boy were they fools. But after a year in the program I couldn’t figure out how our curriculum would keep me from repeating their mistakes. I was left with the impression that startups grow up and go boom, and your’re either showered with cash or tears, and it’s just a roll of the dice that determines which fate awaits you. But I didn’t really care because I didn’t believe my professors. The real reason they went out of business was they were idiots and I am not an idiot.

But here I am, almost four years later, and I am not as rich as Steve Jobs. Not even remotely close. I’ve learned a lot since school, but my base of knowledge was built in that entrepreneurship program. In entrepreneurship schoool I learned what I now call “the three step plan to get someone to give you money so you can make some shit and throw it at the wall and hope it sticks.” strategy.

Step One — Come up with brilliant idea, form a team.

Step Two — Craft a business plan based on “market research”. Be sure to include a spreadsheet describing your financial model that is so complicated it’s threatening to become the singularity.

Step Three — Make a ten slide power point presentation and prepare to convince someone to give you $, (take whatever figure you had in mind for what you need and multiply it by at least three because they’ll laugh at you if you ask for less).

You laugh, but this was state of the art entrepreneurial methodology back in ’05. The entrepreneurship program I went to was consistently ranked either one or two nationally, and if it was ever ranked two, number one was always Stanford. So I always thought I was getting the best education in entrepreneurship money could buy. As it turns out, if I had gone to Stanford the experience would have been a little…different. You see, at Stanford there was a guy named Steve Blank talking about something called Customer Development. And in one of these classes sat Eric Ries.

Let me just get this out of the way right now, so we’re all clear on this: Steve Blank is my hero and The Four Steps to the Epiphany, his book on Customer Development, completely changed the way I think about startups. Steve poured all of his geeky soul into this book. There are charts and graphs, phases and steps and sub-steps. Sometimes it’s a bit too detailed. His perspective is coming from a wealth of experience with B2B enterprise software, and it’s tough to apply some of what he says to a B2C web 2.0, social media, micro-blogging platform with-big-green-button landing page startup. But I think with all the steps and phases, Steve was trying to make a point: you can take this outline, this process I followed, and do it again. Contained within this book is a repeatable step-by-step process for creating a company…and it’s  iterative. This last bit is what matters the most — it has your almost inevitable first failure baked in.  The idea of the ‘pivot’ is certainly making the rounds in startup communities, and it’s been around in lore and in the heads of successful entrepreneurs and VCs for a long time. But it’s not even remotely near entrepreneurship curriculum, at least it wasn’t when I was in school — except at Stanford. Steve has taken what used to be considered the ‘innate talent’ of an entrepeneur and put it in book form. It turns out you  can teach this stuff.

And there you have it, Customer Development is the biggest nugget of gold behind the Lean Startup. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of other nuggets behind the Lean Startup, and Eric Ries is one brilliant guy. And oh yeah, he’s had some startup success as well. But I sometimes worry that the Hacker News crowd has their marketing bullshit filters turned up a little bit too high and they’re missing what I think is the beginning of a new wave of entrepreneurship. If you think spending three months hacking together something for demo day represents the very best way to start up, you’re wrong. You’re closer than I was in my entrepreneurship class, but you’re still wrong. You can be faster and smarter.