Steve Blank

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Corporate Acquisitions of Startups: Why Do They Fail?

Steve Blank

More often than not the results of these acquisitions are disappointing. The goal is to get a corporate investment or an outright acquisition of the startup. VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

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What Founders Need to Know: You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event – Start Looking

Steve Blank

As the company goes from searching for a business model to growth , only then will they bring in a new “professional” management team to scale the company (along with a business development executive to search for an acquirer) or prepare for an IPO. Unfortunately, it’s the rare VC who has already built an acquisition roadmap.

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How Do You Want to Spend Your Next 4 Years of Your Life?

Steve Blank

Or is it something that can grow to a size that will result in an acquisition or some liquidity event? Founders don’t do startups because they’re searching for a huge financial windfall. Is it a lifestyle business while you’re keeping your other job? If I Didn’t Make Any Money After 4 Years, Did I Still Have A Great Time?

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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. Technology in search of a market. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders.

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Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model

Steve Blank

Startups are the search to find order in chaos. The Search for the Business Model. A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The search for a profitable and scalable business model might require a startup is make multiple pivots – some small adjustments and others major changes.

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Technology, Innovation, and Modern War – Class 17 – Organizational Design – Safi Bahcall

Steve Blank

Google, at the time, was overhauling the back end of their search engine. They built their search engine 20 years ago. I’m not going to talk about reforming the acquisition process, which many of your class speakers have mentioned and does need to get done. When I sat down with Admiral Selby , we talked about Google.

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Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

Steve Blank

The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading. It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud.

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