Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. How much will it cost to solve this problem now?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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 230

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 230

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 Product Development Diagram 1. Where Are the Customers?

Customer Development 244

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

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.

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development.

Venture Capital 239

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 239

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 203

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

At first only the national laboratories and the largest companies could afford to buy supercomputers, (the Cray-1 cost ~$9 million) but over time scientists and researchers were also starting to use them. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. Gracias for another great read Steve!

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 167

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Bontq – hosted bug tracking and project management needs.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

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 194

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. 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.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. user-generated content) can increase liquidity and decrease distribution costs (notably talent search and evaluation), there are certain individuals whose opinions will count for more than the simple votes of the masses.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. This has two major drawbacks: the central directory can become a single point of failure, and there is a performance cost for having to consult the directory ever time you want to access data anywhere in the cluster. Key-based partitioning.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

David Teten

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

laughter) Kappos: The current fees ($10-$15K) are way below our real cost ($30-$40K). We’ve revectored to an agile development methodology. Our process to process appeals is particularly bad; # appeals not yet heard forms a vertical line if we graph it. We are charging full boat: what it costs us to do the work.

Intellectual Property 60

Intellectual Property Detroit Technical Review Software Review 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

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. A few successful ones do all these things. But if you have a web based product the right answer may be 300-500. Thank you, Steve.

Customer Development 253

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

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. As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 127

Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

You can get big-time, modern, virtual phone functionality at a fraction of the cost. Best sales person, best analyst, best accountant, best engineer, whatever. And while companies might still organize themselves as a hierarchy, how we get work done now is less vertical and much more horizontal. They had the most tenure.

Leadership 59

Leadership Demand Global Community 59

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Their own internal culture would tie them up in knots, and agile startups could run rings around them. But sales came first. (By

Silicon Valley 132

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 132

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

I am the VP of Engineering at a cutting-edge startup that sells software built on the.NET platform. You whine about how hard it is to find good engineers, then go on and on about how you intentionally avoid at least half of the market for skilled people? It’s like arguing against vertical software. How about ABAPer?

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Google’s USP might be in the way they connect people with information, whereas Amazon’s might be providing whatever product you need quickly, efficiently, and at as low a cost as possible. Curved lines are visibly flexible and can communicate agility and reactivity. Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162