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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335
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Zhongguancun in Beijing – China’s Silicon Valley (Part 4 of 5)

Steve Blank

But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. Car sales in China went from 1 million in 2001 to 14 million in 2011. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

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Zhongguancun in Beijing – China’s Silicon Valley (Part 4 of 5)

Steve Blank

But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. Car sales in China went from 1 million in 2001 to 14 million in 2011. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

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The Changing Venture Landscape

Both Sides of the Table

In 2001 companies IPO’d very quickly if they were working, by 2011 IPOs had slowed down to the point that in 2013 Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures astutely called billion-dollar outcomes “unicorns.” The legends of Silicon Valley?—?two two founders in a garage?—?(HP HP Style) are dead. It’s just now that we’re Seed Investors.

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Can You Trust Any vc's Under 40?

Steve Blank

In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

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boldstart 2018 recap and what’s hot in enterprise 2019

BeyondVC

Once again, we led each of these rounds at slide deck stage and helped land the first handful of customers to accelerate path to product market fit and their Series A rounds. This means more collaboration with the Fortune 500 and more go-to-market experience as our portfolio companies navigate their path to first customers.

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Retro: My Favorite Blog Post on Raising VC

Both Sides of the Table

I had previously raised VC in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005. It included one firm who I asked not to call Salesforce.com as a reference (they were our largest pilot customer) and in their kindness they called Marc Benioff (the CEO) and asked his opinion. I thought, what would I do if I was trying to sell to a customer.