Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the Pivots in their search for a repeatable business model.

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Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Taking My Class.

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Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. In fact, Google’s offer for $15 Million was equal to the highest valuation from the venture firms. The question was: what did the founders want to do? Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. Go For Broke.

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Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. The goal was commercial products, but as scientists and engineers the company’s founders realized that at times the cost of experimentation was failure. Scientists and Engineers as Founders.

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Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

Ann who had been my Teaching Assistant while she had finished her PhD at Stanford felt the same frustration about teaching entrepreneurs to assemble a business plan that we knew in the real world wouldn’t survive first contact with customers. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner.

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 226

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s went back to basics, to focus on building companies while their founders worked on building customers. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. That requires building a company using Agile and Customer Development.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup IP 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Here’s how.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

Venture Capital 297

Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Founders operate in a chaotic regime. Victor Hugo.

Silicon Valley 281

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 281

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Here’s how.

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of funding and got an 8-digit term sheet that same afternoon.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. Wondering how do I get in touch with you - I am founder of a company here in San jose, CA and would like to invite you to be part of our advisor team. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

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. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 12, 2015

The SBIR/STTR program made ~6,200 seed stage investments in 2014, dwarfing the seed investments made by venture capital. startups that don’t fit whatever’s hot in venture capital. To address this problem, the NSF collaborated with Steve Blank to adapt his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford for NSF-funded founders.

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SBIR Maryland Lean Seed Stage 120

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. to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. There were no venture investors. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. And no one who really knew could tell you.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

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. What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

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. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Truth: There’s nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Myth: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback. But they do not blindly do what customers tell them , nor do they mechanically attempt to optimize numbers.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. Seed-stage investors are learning the metrics of traction, and are getting better at identifying those companies that are really achieving validated learning about customers. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the startup, it's time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Here's how.

Silicon Valley 117

Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

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 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

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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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

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. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? What went wrong?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

female founders. founder friday. Lessons learned from female founders and women entrepreneurs. Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White on Building a Successful Startup » FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder. Tweet By Elizabeth Knopf (Co-Founder & CEO, Sorced). Scoring Founder “Dates” On My Own.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Let this article serve us reminders to founders and boards alike Reply Michael F. The Curse of a New Building At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do&# companies to [.] [.] I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures. Am I a Founder? Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA……………… 5. Raising Money Using Customer Development……… 47.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 202

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

But what I remind them is that great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.) You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.

Silicon Valley 327

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of venture capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

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