Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about 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.

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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.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. They might do anything !

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. I help lead the Engineering Leadership SIG at SDForum and wonder if you would be interested in speaking to our group about lean starups. Blew my mind.

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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.

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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. 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.

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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 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.

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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. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single? Sign me up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience. My personal background was as an engineer and my companies had been Web-based startups, so that is what I wrote about. It's a big tent.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

The leadership art is to balance the needs of the present with the needs of the future. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? My career has been full of " student body right " moments, where the whole team is suddenly forced to change direction. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 26, 2010

It was an all day event devoted to the theory and practice of Lean Startups and Customer Development. It wasn’t until Eric Ries sat in my class and had the insight – that to actually implement Customer Development engineers needed to couple it with an agile methodology – that the theory turned into practice.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. There’s a much better way.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

Here in Tampa, our biggest challenge is convincing the regions technology "leadership" that grassroots economic development is a good thing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I just emailed your article to him and recommended that he take your advice to heart.

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Steve Blank

MAY 12, 2015

NSF led the development of the SBIR program in the late 1970s. We believe NSF’s leadership with I-Corps will deliver something of equal significance… a program that teaches scientists and engineers what it takes to turn those research projects into products and services for the benefit of society.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? You can find the origins of many successful companies in these early lessons. Expo SF (May.

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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

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.

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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. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

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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. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed.

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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. This wave of 1950′s/’60′s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

This meeting was a biannual gathering of all the leadership involved in the corporate-wide initiatives to out-innovate their new disruptors. It was a testament to John and Avika’s leadership that even off duty people were passionately debating how to solve these problems. Some of the teams even included some of their close partners.

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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. Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

While both Stanford and MIT encouraged commercially oriented research and courted federal research contracts in the postwar years, MITs leadership focused on building relations with government agencies and seeking financial support from established electronics producers. What is customer development? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Beyond Apple, we can find examples of the Steve Jobs character at Toyota, in the form of the Chief Engineer. There are some good anecdotes about Chief Engineers in the Toyota Product Development Book. Some of these reaffirm that they do indeed validate assumptions through interaction with customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 18, 2009

The Thought Leadership talks are awesome. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? J oe Mathes set a great example by sponsoring a ticket to the Boulder workshop out of sheer generosity. Thanks, Joe! Hope to see you soon! 3comments: Lincoln Nguyen said. Great talk tonight.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

Does lean startup xlate into sustainable success where a fast feedback/iteration loop yields market leadership? Does it make sense to play the customer chase with investors as well? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? " Is there a direct, causative link?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Hire a CTO or VP Engineering.

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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?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) This is a good thing. (I Expo SF (May.

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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: [.] Reply Harvey , on April 11, 2009 at 7:05 pm Said: Some of the best engineers I hired out of school were not 3.5+ You just get successful.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

———————– In the 1950′s Stanford University’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) continued to develop innovative microwave tubes for the U.S. This next product, the Traveling Wave Tube, would have a major impact on electronic intelligence. Fred Terman was just getting warmed up.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

Encouraged by their Dean, Fred Terman, scientists and engineers left Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory to set up companies to build microwave tubes and systems for the military. doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by Stanford engineering faculty members or senior research associates (staff.)

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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. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications. When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Obama understood the two concepts that are essential for building a high-performance, highly adaptable, agile organization: 1) rapid iteration and 2) clear values-based objectives. Mission synchronization If an organization is changing on a daily basis how is it that it doesnt look "erratic" yet feels "agile." Expo SF (May.

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