Bob Dorf

Bob Dorf is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, author, and recognized adviser on various startup company strategies, including customer development and the Lean Startup concept. Nicknamed the “midwife of Customer Development,” Dorf has worked with retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank. Dorf helped deploy Blank’s Customer Development methodology when the startup E.piphany launched in 1996, and provided criticism and feedback for Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to Epiphany. Dorf coauthored The Startup Owner’s Manual, published in 2012. He teaches and lectures about the Customer Development methodology at Columbia University Business School and at venues in London, Paris, Moscow, Colombia and Brazil.
History in the startup field
Early startups and Peppers & Rogers Group
Before launching his first startup, Bob Dorf was a news editor at WINS radio in New York. At age 22, he founded Dorf & Stanton Communications in his living room, which Shandwick P.L.C. purchased with a down payment of $6.4 million in 1989.
Dorf cofounded Marketing 1to1 (which later became Peppers & Rogers Group) and expanded the company to a staff of more than 400. In addition to growing the company, his previous “three decades of hands-on experience in growing successful companies and forming strategic alliances between prime movers across a variety of industry sectors” qualified him as CEO at Peppers & Rogers Group.
In 1999, he coauthored The One to One Fieldbook with Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. ' said of the book: “If your company is launching a customer-focused strategy…it sets the agenda.”
In addition to coauthoring The One to One Fieldbook, Dorf contributed to the Harvard Business Review with Peppers & Rogers in January 1999. The book is credited with launching the lean startup movement by teaching entrepreneurs how to “get out of the building” and talk to customers, then use that customer feedback to develop and refine their product before it is launched.
During this time, Dorf also advised Blank on the startup E.piphany.
After two years of research on ideas first introduced in The Four Steps to Epiphany, the manual was published in early 2012.
Published by K&S Ranch, The Startup Owner’s Manual encompasses the best practices embraced by entrepreneurs since The Four Steps to Epiphany was published.
Customer Development
Bob Dorf runs K&S Ranch’s consultancy, helping large companies and corporations deploy customer development strategies through workshops and hands-on exercises.
Teaching
In the spring of 2012, Dorf began teaching a course on startups at Columbia Business School called “The Lean LaunchPad.”