Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 139

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YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 14, 2019

New building materials, construction equipment, and innovative project management made construction more efficient – unlocking technologies that lead to higher skyscrapers, undersea tunnels, longer bridges, and mega projects that changed the face of the Earth.

Global 189

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

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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. In 1964, Bill Perry, the head of the lab, frustrated with GTE’s management, quit (GTE, a phone company had bought Sylvania in 1959.) There were no venture investors. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I was met by a very apologetic manager who said, “We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last week. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. I am sorry there really isn’t a job for you.&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In the old days, the brand manager of a consumer packaged goods product had to spend energy inferring the effectiveness of their television ads through a combination of trailing indicators (like market share) or time-consuming market research. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

Their mission is to allow scientists and engineers to focus on the fundamental research needed to solve complex problems without the expensive and difficult data management usually required. This includes co-founders, management, team member, board members, investors, clients, etc. CEO Higinio O.

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David Teten

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

Kappos: No inventions are needed to manage the post-grant process [i.e., 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. They finally brought management in to break the tie.

Intellectual Property 60

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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. all while saying “we’ll make it up later.” It rarely happens that way.)

Customer Development 246

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Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

Best sales person, best analyst, best accountant, best engineer, whatever. Giving candid feedback, managing poor performers, making tough decisions that might be unpopular for you but important for the organization and you must do it. Or because they stuck around the longest. They had the most tenure.

Leadership 60

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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.

Silicon Valley 212

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

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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.

Silicon Valley 124

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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. Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Managing these situations is hard for any company, but potentially lethal for a startup. The theory is that there is some truth in both camps, and the right way to manage the disagreement is to sprinkle a little bit of both into our plans. To the people being managed that way, it feels like the boss is being capricious or arbitrary.

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crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Curved lines are visibly flexible and can communicate agility and reactivity. Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines. Unlike vertical or diagonal lines, they look as though gravity has already acted upon them and there is nowhere for them to fall. Vertical lines run perpendicular to the horizon. Management.

Marketing 162

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.

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. 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+ When recruiting was hard the functional managers started looking at 2.8-9s. GPA or better.

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Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Comparing the list to the top 300 leading SaaS companies in the US, some interesting trends emerge: Europe is showing strength in data/ analytics and security, driven by the booming ecosystem in Israel but is less represented in developer/infrastructure and vertical applications. and Intacct for $0.85B.

Europe 83

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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. Their own internal culture would tie them up in knots, and agile startups could run rings around them. But sales came first. (By

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Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2022

Power Recommendation Engines. Engineers can input design goals into AI-driven generative design software , along with parameters such as performance or spatial requirements, materials, manufacturing methods, and cost constraints. Supply chain management. Automated Battle management – air and missile defense, army/navy tactical….

Artificial Inteligence 419

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

And.NET’s languages (C#, IronPython, managed C++, etc.) 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? Like what?!

Java 107

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

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. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. But I was breathing heavy and it felt like I was looking at supercomputer porn.

Silicon Valley 151

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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.

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