Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 264

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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.” .

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 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 139

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts. And for sure they were never going to win any design awards. So we not only sent everyone through packaging school, we also brought the packaging design in-house.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Someone from your company has to be designated the official competitive intelligence officer for this show. Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) One of them is a loser.

Silicon Valley 129

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

So they systematically designed electronic devices called “jammers&# to shut down each part of the German air defense system. And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Chaff used 3/4′s of all the aluminum foil in the U.S. How was this possible?

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 263

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. A-12 OXCART CIA Spyplane ESL found other ways to stay very close to its customers. could design and produce, and a good part of it was coming from Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley 176

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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. Reply 7thpixel , on June 29, 2009 at 10:23 am Said: My first start up in 1999 I was employee #10 or so and signed up for a Graphic Designer position.

Agile 251

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

I have a question though- do you think that most content metrics (the ebook example you mentioned) should be developed by the "author" to target their specific data, or do you think there are opportunities for a new business vertical that give these tools directly to the creator. August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

San Francisco 113

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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. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I can’t get this one out of my head. during World War II.

Silicon Valley 136

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

While the story about the Potereo benchmarks was about relentless execution, its glib description of designing the benchmarks could be read as we cheated. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed. Given we consciously worked hard not to, here’s what we were thinking.

Silicon Valley 124

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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. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. billion dollar test and measurement company.

Silicon Valley 169

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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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 250

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Designing the Perfect Building Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building. I was great at “office wars.”)

Silicon Valley 212

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Soviet Air Defense – PVO Strany The B-52s had to get through a massive Soviet air defense system that had been built and evolved over two decades and was designed to shoot down manned bombers. All of this designed to make the plane if not invisible to Soviet radar, at least really difficult to lock onto and shoot down.

Silicon Valley 202

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. The non-linear features of vacuum tubes probably changed that.

Silicon Valley 279

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

As it was a vocational school, I think the most math we had to do was to figure out whether we got a passing grade, and no one was in any danger of actually designing new equipment, but I left with an excellent education in troubleshooting, and solving complex problems in real-time. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Silicon Valley 215

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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 421

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 421

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 presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me.

Venture Capital 216

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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. These damn models weren’t designed right so we’re fixing them on the line.” I coach agile teams for a living, and I do most of my work with start-ups.

Founder 302

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers.

San Francisco 133

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. Sharding for startups To support a single partitioning scheme is easy, especially if you design for it from the start. Ive taught everyone from hard-core programmers to scripters to HTML-designers to use it properly. to store it.

San Francisco 151

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. You just get successful. Sometimes they just drop out and do their own thing. Steve Blank [.]

Silicon Valley 329

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

The ultimate dream of ELINT equipment designers was a “high-probability of intercept” receiver, one that would pick up a signal that came up on any frequency and capture even a single pulse, however brief. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Keep in mind that 32 of these planes were shot down in the Cold War.) Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 158

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

But unlike the majority of existing tube manufacturers in the valley who were making products for radios, Stanford Electronics Research Lab tube group had a special customer with very special needs – the U.S. So what exactly was the Electronics Research Lab designing? Air Force and its Strategic Air Command.

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Because of the vagaries of how floating point units in computers were designed, your average IBM mainframe of the day would take forever to run a simulation application. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.] A supercomputer could be a 100x faster. What Markets?

Silicon Valley 151

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2009

The reality is that independent electric vehicle startups will win over time (closer to the customer, more agile, etc.) Also, people successful with their designs could be able to earn some royalties, if they decide to do so! was somewhat incomprehensible at first to the Energy and EPA team. over a national platform.

Silicon Valley 120

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

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