Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

and the subsequent acquisition sprees of companies like Google, Yahoo!, Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? The COGS (costs of goods sold) tells me about how big your customer acquisition costs will be. portfolios.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

Doing so meant they would have to take risks for IP acquisition and customer/market risks outside their experience or comfort zone. The program became large enough that it came time to choose between expanding the program or making it more technology focused and closely tied to corporate R&D. Lessons Learned.

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. He runs H4X Labs.

Oakland 301

Oakland Asia Lean Video 301

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He He set up Blackbox.vc, a seed accelerator for technology startups (and one of the tour stops for entrepreneurs from around the world.) I was feeling pretty old.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.” Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley’s engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. Early entrants get sold to corporate acquirers at inflated prices for their teams, their technology, and their tools. Producers of the technology shake out or fail.

Artificial Inteligence 318

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 318

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. the Customer Life Time (CLT)).

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

I think everybody heard about this acquisition. They bought distribution and engineering talent. On the founder’s side it’s about taking money off of the table and / or having strategic reserves for big acquisitions. Rumored: Digital Sky Technologies. Atebits dba Tweetie (acquired by Twitter).

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Affiliate Valuation San Francisco 271

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development. We never seek any rights to give Amex preferential treatment at the time of a potential acquisition. It can help develop applications for the startup’s technology in its early days.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Tech IPOs were a receding memory, and mergers and acquisitions became the only path to liquidity for startups. Thus began the 5-year dot-com bubble. The New Exits.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. All the presentations are worth a watch. Team: Panacea.

Oakland 266

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 266

Steve Blank

JANUARY 26, 2016

Hacking for Defense is a new course at Stanford’s Engineering School in the Spring of 2016. Up until the dawn of the 21 st century, they defined military technology superiority. Our defense and intelligence community owned and/or could buy and deploy the most advanced technology in the world. Its Not Just the Technology.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Korea Agile Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs. Capital is returned to these investors through liquidity events (originally public offerings, but today mostly acquisitions). Filed under: Corporate Innovation , Customer Development.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

BMNT , a new Silicon Valley company, is combining the Lean Methods it learned in combat with the technology expertise and speed of startups. They gave the problem to Colonel Bruce Jette, and 90 days and $750,000 later he had bypassed the existing Army acquisition system and bought existing robots from companies. The Gulf Wars.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Afghanistan Iraq Kuwait 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2016

That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulating the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey.

Agile 120

Agile Security Audio Video 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley’s engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. Early entrants get sold to corporate acquirers at inflated prices for their teams, their technology, and their tools. Producers of the technology shake out or fail.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 120

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. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. ——————– Engineering 245.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. Its the same with acquisitions. but rest assured they would be.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship , an introduction to building a scalable startup. None of the students were domain experts in their areas, and each team had to figure out how to contact potential customers and channel partners.

Intellectual Property 226

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 226

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

In a subscription business, maybe your attrition starts matching your acquisition, balancing like magic. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Change Customer Relationships to Buy-in/Support.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. Competing To Win Deals - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 7, 2010 The venture capital business is highly competitive. This post is an accusation.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

Fourth , would the same Lean Startup methodology (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) used in the Lean LaunchPad and NSF I-Corps class work here? Multiple teams have been engaged by government, prime contractor and VC firms for follow-on discussions/engagements. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 128

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

Fourth , would the same Lean Startup methodology (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) used in the Lean LaunchPad and NSF I-Corps class work here? Multiple teams have been engaged by government, prime contractor and VC firms for follow-on discussions/engagements. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

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. Think of the most amazing spectrum analyzer you could build with 1960s technology. Then think some more. I was always kind of curious.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 195

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. The “technical debt term&# is very popular amongst engineers. what a coincidence.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

It’s actually pretty hard to find a good start-up job if you have no real engineering or user acquisition / product management skills. My company and product involve HW/SW/RF/embedded system integration, and I am NO kind of engineer. Why You Shouldn’t: You’re postponing your dream for at least two years.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

His friends at General Electric said he was wasting his time on the gas combustion engine because the world was going electric. -- ErrantX 215 days ago | link. The story of the v-8 engine is a bit different. His quote on the subject, "no amount of finance will cure mismanagement". From "Think and Grow Rich".

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 21, 2010

And yet, we so often loose sight of the fact that startups are not their products, their technological breakthroughs, or even their data. To see proof of this, simply observe the results of the large majorities of corporate acquisitions of startups. Even the most radical new inventions always build upon previous technology.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Startup Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

In fact, this crisis was at the heart of Steve Blank ’s original impetus to develop customer development as an alternative set of milestones to use for startups.) But who do you think makes those acquisition decisions? Far too many of these acquisitions go nowhere. I also frequently see the reverse.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

June 2014 – Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown write Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth , which defines growth strategies as growth engines. An Epic List of 100 Growth Hacks for Startups by Search Engine Journal. via TechCrunch). …Really?

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Consequently, I either needed a tech co-founder or to pay someone to develop the product. Given those criteria, where are the watering holes to find these engineers?

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

We now have the tools, technology and data to take incubators and accelerators to the next level. Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. They invented a 9-step description of how ready a technology project was. We think we can do better.

Oakland 326

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 326

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2010

The company’s two co-founders had created a new technology and an innovative business strategy. The engineering co-founder had created a consumer electronics security product that created an entirely new category. We Think We Need Some Technology Advice. It was impressive. More on this in another post.). Distracted.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Cofounder Acquisition Kansas 267

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2017

That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey.

Silicon Valley 182

Silicon Valley Southern California Lean San Diego 182