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New Rules for the New Internet Bubble

Steve Blank

Over time, open source software the rise of the next wave of web startups and the embrace of Agile Engineering meant that startups no longer needed millions of dollars to buy specialized computers and license expensive software – they could start a company on their credit cards. Rules For the New Bubble: 2011 -2014. The New Exits.

Internet 334
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No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake.

Steve Blank

But nine months after the first call was made in 1998, Iridium was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Today, the successor company serves some 300,000 customers in a series of niche markets including American soldiers calling home from war zones, oil rig managers, and big game hunters. No Business Plan survives first contact with a customer.

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Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA

Steve Blank

1998 – the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership.

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The Lean Entrepreneur is here

Startup Lessons Learned

Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile. Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits are among the earliest adopters of new ideas such as Lean Startup and customer development.

Lean 167
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Lessons Learned: Lean hiring tips

Startup Lessons Learned

One, which is described in great detail in the Mythical Man-Month (in finding that link, I discovered that today is coincidentally the exact 11th anniversary of my first purchasing that book: Jan 19, 1998), is that as you add people to a team or project, there is an increase in communications overhead that makes everyone slightly less productive.

Lean 140
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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

In May of 1998, India detonated several nuclear weapons at a test site near New Delhi. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? A similar kind of datablindness happened in the US intelligence community in the decades following the launch of photoreconnaissance satellites.