Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. 2-way search is still in the works but I have the semantic extracted tags (thanks to Zemanta) feeding in to many search engines (activate realtime frankensearch). I was an idiot. What type of feedback do you think I should go after?Obviously

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.&#. Ok, I get a lot of these. Is this some grad student or post doc who wanted to do some independent study? I was feeling pretty old.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. We listed the editors, writers, what they had previously had written, deadlines, what the competitive products were, how our benchmarks stacked up, what “upgrades” our boards needed from engineering to win, etc.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. I found that having a senior marketer responsible for business strategy surrounded by ex-engineers and domain experts makes one heck of a powerful marketing department.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric Ries co-founded Catalyst Recruiting while attending Yale, and continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com. He was named entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School in 2010 and is currently an IDEO Fellow. Listen to my entire chat with Eric: If you can’t hear the interview, click here.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

I’ve known Professor Cristobal Garcia since 2010 when he hosted my first visit to Catholic University in Santiago of Chile and to southern Patagonia. Co mpanies also face Wicked problems. In contrast, designing AI-driven enterprise software or building dating apps are comparatively simple problems.)

Lean 294

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 294

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program. Teaching in Chile. Valaparaiso houses. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what I call “Chilecon Valley” is being talked about continually here.

Chile 235

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 235

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Four years later Ayer and another Granger engineer would leave Granger and found one of the preeminent electronic warfare and ELINT companies: Applied Technologies. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. —– When I came to U.C.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Combined with product costs, an engineering budget, and schedules, this results in a spreadsheet that faintly resembles the first financial plan in the company’s business plan. Engineering focuses on building the product; it designs the product, specifies the first release and hires a staff to build the product.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2010

It was a dry run of a talk I’ll be giving at Eric Ries’ Startup Lessons Learned conference April 23 2010 in San Francisco ( streaming and simulcast across the world.) BTW, “ Fishbon &# in the title slide is the name of the artists/engineers/writers collective that hosted the talk. The talk is below.

San Francisco 251

San Francisco California Startup Customer Development 251

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. The plan calls for selling in volume the day Engineering is finished building the product. While the product is being engineered, Marketing begins to create web sites, corporate presentations and sales materials.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 153

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I am also a pilot, and computer engineer, and love to read stories about sigint and black aircraft programs. Besides it being harder to get funding, it seems like this would be a good time to get cheap labor, rent, and product. Also, it would be nice to do something that helps this country (but not solely for that reason).

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 170

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Market Type Integral to the Customer Development model is the notion that Market Type choices affect the way the company will deploy its sales, marketing and financial resources. — giffconstable.com , on January 31, 2010 at 10:28 pm Said: [.] doing more to teach sales and product design.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.) Very few companies can make the “Four Steps to the Epiphany” work financially – this is one reason having engineering located in a cheaper country from day one is a major plus.&#

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Reply Don Cook , on September 24, 2010 at 1:34 am Said: I also was a ECM troop in the early 80′s. I was always kind of curious.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 195

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department. Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc. IBM doesn’t have to shout to get noticed, but you do.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Product Development – How do you engineer it? Business and Revenue Model – How do we organize to make money? Intellectual Property/Patents – Strategic or Tactical, timing? Regulatory Issues – What are they? Time to Market – How long? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Manufacturing – How do you build it? Liquidity – How? M&A, IPO?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

For example, in the semiconductor business engineers spend enormous time, money and effort on simulation , the process of actually building the chip in software and running tests to see how well it will perform – well before they ever get to first silicon. The applications in the bowling alley would not necessarily be similar.

Vertical 128

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda. VP of Sales?

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 175

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. ——————– Engineering 245. Actually engage in “search engine marketing” (SEM)spend $20 as a team to test customer acquisition cost. Below is the class syllabus.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

In a major break from the past, where the military designed all its own weapons, 10,000 scientists and engineers from academia worked in civilian-run weapons labs (most headquartered in universities) in an organization called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). In World War II the U.S.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Afghanistan Iraq Kuwait 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team. Reply Javier Rincón , on July 13, 2010 at 2:10 am Said: Very insighful post.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single? Sign me up.

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245