Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing? For example, some startup sales execs believe hiring the core sales team is a key objective.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

In every startup I did, every new course I created, and everything I’ve taught, the phrase “make every day count” took on new meaning when I knew how many were left. When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

The key things I want students to take from the class are: Understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model. A partner allows me the flexibility to miss a session or two (my job as a California Coastal Commissioner meets three days every month up and down the coast of California.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a spec in two years, let alone get 10′s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done. How was this possible? invention of electronic warfare, part I and [.]

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. They proposed feature sets that they would plan to build and stack ranked how important these customers thought they would be. Turn Your Organization Inside Out.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space. Even for the smallest trade show, no one shows up without booth training.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Keep ‘em coming.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 20, 2014

Over 1,000 students a year are learning lean startup concepts. The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customer development and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) Encourage new startups?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. A kite-boarding startup?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank (tags: startup) [.] You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department.

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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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2015

military can work together – for access to advanced technology and to learn how to move with agility, speed and urgency. — — — — In this second segment, Takashi Tsutsumi and Masato Iino talk about how they brought the Lean Startup to Japan. The focus of our first segment is how Silicon Valley and the U.S.

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Channel Japan Bosnia Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley « Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA Rocket Science 2: Drinking the Kool-Aid » 2 Responses Ben , on July 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said: Great post Steve. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. I can’t get this one out of my head. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. I teach teams various Agile techniques, and occasionally get told some particular trick is cheating. E.g., we take a big spec, cut the 80% that, for some core group of customers, is nice rather than necessary, and ship the 20% ASAP. A final note. Do the right thing.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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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 130

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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

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Reply Gravity Will Be Turned Off « Avid Editor’s Insights , on May 17, 2009 at 1:31 am Said: [.] entire story can be found at Steve Blank.

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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. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method. Now his son is reading your blog about creating a startup. Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.]

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Their presentation looked like this: Market/Opportunity Lessons Learned Slide 1 Lessons Learned Slide 2 Lessons Learned Slide 3 Why We’re Here Telling the Cafepress Customer Discovery and Customer Validation story allowed Fred and Maheesh to take the VC’s on their journey year by year. Your results may vary.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. This wave of 1950′s/’60′s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Those of us who have had the privilege of working in the premier startup hub in the world often take its advantages for granted. In true startup form, the world was forever changed when the CIA and the National Security Agency acted as venture capitalists for this first wave of entrepreneurship. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 8, 2009 What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? Beyond just those who will be hearing about the lean startup for the first time, Im expecting to shake a lot of hands and have a lot of interesting side conversations. And what hurdles could be eliminated?

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. Martin , on April 7, 2009 at 3:17 pm Said: Of course, the other way to look at this is that formal education should become more like working at a startup if we want students to stay engaged. I love Google.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2017

It combines the same Lean Startup Methodology used by the National Science Foundation to commercialize science, with the rapid problem sourcing and curation methodology developed on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq by Colonel Pete Newell and the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. 21 st Century Frogman.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

It ended with a large layoff and a transfer of jobs from NY to California and Bangalore. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 83

Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Funded by military contracts, these 1950′s microwave tube startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment. Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Fred Terman, encouraged scientists and engineers to set up companies to build these microwave tubes for the military. Why Electronics Intelligence?

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