Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. Free: Startup Tools. If you’re building a startup, the Startup Tools tab on the top of this page has curated links to hundreds of startup resources.

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Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2012

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… John F.

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Silicon Valley Venture Capital Social Media Media 336

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

Inc. magazine is publishing a 12-part series of excerpts from The Startup Owner’s Manual , the new step-by-step “how to” guide for startups. The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Feedback from my readers suggested you’d appreciate seeing the series posted here, as well. ———– Whether your venture is a new pizza parlor or the hottest new so

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Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S. ) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

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Silicon Valley Distribution Washington Channel 336

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2012

How to build regional entrepreneurial communities has just gotten it’s first “here’s how to do it” book. Brad Feld’s new book Startup Communities joins the two other “must reads,” ( Regional Advantage and Startup Nation ) and one “must view” ( The Secret History of Silicon Valley ) for anyone trying to understand the components of a regional cluster.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2012

Almost every large company understands it needs to build an organization that deals with the ever-increasing external forces of continuous disruption , the need for continuous innovation , globalization and regulation. But there is no standard strategy and structure for creating corporate innovation. We outline the strategy problem in this post and will propose some specific organizational suggestions in follow-on posts. —-.

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Business Model Customer Development United States Operations 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2012

The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human social needs and figure out how to mediate them on-line. (Look at the first wave of the web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora, Zynga, WordPress, LinkedIn.). It’s your turn. Hard-wired. This week I’m in New York teaching a 5-day version of my Lean LaunchPad class at Columbia University.

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Startup New York Customer Development Business Model 334

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 21, 2012

I often get asked about finding cofounders and I usually give the standard list of characteristics of what I look for in a founder. And I emphasize the value of a founding team with complementary skills sets – i.e. the hacker/hustler/designer cofounder archetype for web/mobile apps. But Jessica Alter , Cofounder & CEO of FounderDating , pointed out that co founders did not mean two founders in the same room.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search. for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It’s understanding who to listen to and why. Five Cups of Coffee. I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, “following your customer development stuff is making my company fail.

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Customer Business Model Customer Development Startup 325

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2012

Faced with disruptive innovation, you can be sure any possibility for innovation dies when a company forms a committee for an “overarching strategy.”. —– I was reminded how innovation dies when the email below arrived in my inbox. It was well written, thoughtful and had a clearly articulated sense of purpose. You may have seen one like it in your school or company.

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Portfolio California Customer Development Framework 325

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context.

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad class taught at Stanford , Berkeley, Columbia , Caltech and for the National Science Foundation. Now you too can take this course. I’ve worked with the Udacity , the best online digital university on a mission to democratize education, to produce the course. They’ve done an awesome job. The course includes lecture videos, quizzes and homework assignments.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

A founder’s skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination. Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. ——— Yuri, one of my ex students started a big-data analytics company last year. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2012

It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate. Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my resume. I Badly Want the Job. When I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer.

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Silicon Valley Michigan IP Architecture 315

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 17, 2012

I often get asked, “how do I get a meeting with a VC?” Here is my slightly tongue-in-cheek view. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

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Venture Capital Customer Development Developer Customer 328

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2012

Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun ?/i?pif?n?/. A moment of sudden revelation or insight. We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. ————-.

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Flash Customer Development Business Model Developer 313

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

We Sleep Peaceably In Our Beds At Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready To Do Violence On Our Behalf. Everyone has events that shape the rest of their lives. This was one of mine. ——-. I’ve never been shot at. Much braver men I once worked with faced that every day. But for a year and a half I saw weapons of war take off every day with bombs hanging under the wings.

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Vietnam Thailand Guam Cambodia 312

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2012

TE·NA·CIOUS /T??N?SH?S/. Adjective: Not readily letting go of, giving up, or separated from an object that one holds, a position, or a principle: “a tenacious grip” Not easily dispelled or discouraged; persisting in existence or in a course of action. When I was a entrepreneur I’d pursue a goal relentlessly. Everything in between me and my goal was simply an obstacle that needed to be removed.

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Chicago Washington Virginia Security 306

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a guest post from Jerry Engel, the Faculty Director of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (and the Founding Faculty Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley.). ———– The 99%. As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C.

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Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 14, 2012

In 2012, in partnership with Stanford University , U.C. Berkeley and NCIIA , Jerry Engel and I first offered the Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. The class was designed to teach educators (and the entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship.

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Developer Arizona Lean Business Model 300

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 26, 2012

This July I thought I had set the record for tenacity in my age group. Go ahead and take a moment to read the post , it’s short. I reminded my Startup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf this is how entrepreneurs played the game, blah, blah, blah. As usual Bob did one better. Here’s a guest post on what happened to him in the Ukraine. —– Usually when you teach entrepreneurship, one of the key things you teach is tenacity , a vital characteristic of great entrepreneurs.

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Ukraine Russia Silicon Valley Stealth 291

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

While entrepreneurship is in the news fairly regularly, I seldom make news myself. Today, however there are two important updates for entrepreneurs everywhere. Let me be brief…. The “Startup Owner’s Manual” goes On Press Tuesday 2/14. Two years in the making and literally ten years in development, I’m proud to announce that my new book, The Startup Owners Manual , goes onto the printing press next Tuesday.

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Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 289

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2012

By 1997 E.piphany was a fast growing startup with customers, revenue and something approaching a repeatable business model. Somewhere that year we decided to professionalize our logo (you should have seen the first one.) With a massive leap of creativity we decided that it should it should have our company name and the letter “E” with a swoop over it. 1997 was also that year that Microsoft was in the middle of the browser wars with Netscape.

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SQL Naming Internet Software 282

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2012

In 24 hours we’ll announce something revolutionary. Moving entrepreneurship forward. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

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Lean Business Model Startup Customer Development 265

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Alexander Osterwalder and I spent last week in Salt Lake City, Utah as judges at the 2 nd Annual International Business Model Competition , hosted by Professor Nathan Furr , and his team at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2012

We’ve taught our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and the National Science Foundation in 8 week, 10 week and 12 week versions. We decided to find out what was the Minimum Viable Product for our Lean LaunchPad class. Could students get value out of a 5-day version of the class? The Setup. At the invitation of Murray Low at the Entrepreneurship Center in the Columbia Business School, we went to New York to find out.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development New York 258

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the first five. It Feels Like 20 Years Ago Today. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. To share what we learned, we blogged each of those class sessions , (all the slides can be found here.

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Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2012

Our goal teaching for the National Science Foundation was to make a dent in the universe. Could we actually teach tenured faculty how to turn an idea into a company? And if we did, could it change their lives? We can now answer these questions. Hell yes. ———– The Lean LaunchPad class for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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Lean Incubator Business Model Georgia 248

Steve Blank

MARCH 14, 2012

Today, the second half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the final four (the first five are here.). Team ParkPoint Capital. This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers. 8 weeks later they ended up as a financial service provider for immigrants.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development China 248

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

We ran the first National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class October to December 2011. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~ 2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward in commercializing their technology. Watching the final presentations it was clear that the results were way past our initial expectations (comments from mentors as well as pre- and post-class survey data suggested that most of the

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America Rhode Island Southern California Illinois 241

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 12, 2012

Thanks to: Alexis Finch, Sketchnotes / UX Research Consultant @agentfin. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer 309

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2012

In Prague for the last three days and heading to Berlin tonight. Had an impromptu meet up with the local Prague entreprenuerial community. Smart group. It just reminds me that the worldwide democratization of entreprenuership is real. However, as in many other countries the lack of local “risk capital”, startup business expertise, infrasturcture and startup culture, forces most of the Czech startups to leave and head to Silicon Valley.

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Silicon Valley Customer Development Community Developer 213

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2012

Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad.

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