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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Feld Thoughts

MAY 28, 2015

For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. About a year after he got started, he was ready to raise a venture financing. Ryan was encouraged to team up with Tim and shortly after that happened we co-led the first round VC financing with Boulder Ventures.

Software 70

Software Technology Agile SCRUM 70

Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 10, 2023

5- Yes, to adapt to market changes Photo Credit: Sammi Jaeger It's helped our three Founders stay on the same page, project our roadmap of growth, and provide clarity on our goals, strategies, and financial projections, making it easier to communicate our vision to all of our stakeholders and clients. Thanks to Jordan Adair, Shirt Max ! #14-

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Business Plan Jordan Entrepreneur Florida 130

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer. So, almost like clockwork 20 th century startups fired the innovators/founders when they scaled.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 227

Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 7, 2013

The picture to the left is of Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder and CTO, giving Josie Health, the CEO of The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County , a check for $676,000. Part of that vision became the agile software development products that Rally makes. But Ryan’s vision was always bigger than that.

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Community Colorado Common Stock Equity 182

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 3, 2017

by Bill Lewis, co-founder at Temasys Communications. The traditional flows of goods, services, and finance appeared then, and now, to have stalled. Newcomers have agility, speed to market, and – often – innovation on their side. Global trade dipped in 2008. It rose in 2009, but never regained its upward trajectory.

Global 113

Global Technical Review Agile Internet 113

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2017

To confidently answer no, co-founder of Strategyzer Alex Osterwalder told our attendees, “What you really want to do is work more like Amazon. … The result is a combination of design thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Scrum, and Ignacio’s innovation team includes 25 coaches who train employees in PACE best practices.

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Lean Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 245

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. It consists of a highly intelligent and opinionated founder – Nick Halstead. The Agile Board. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million.

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Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the Pivots in their search for a repeatable business model. One of my favorites: “ Judging will include such factors as: Market opportunity, reward to risk, strategy, implementation plan, financing plan, etc.”) All of which may be true in large companies.

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Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 314

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” Or it’s fatal because that was a co-founder. “The future is inherently unpredictable,” insists the small company, spurred on by Lean and Agile mindsets. At scale, the risks are completely different.

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Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

mashable.com

JUNE 11, 2013

Or maybe the co-founders have a poisonous relationship that will hinder the companys growth. Check out the tips below from founders, CEOs and investors alike. Then remove half." — Jonathan Wegener , Founder, Timehop and ExitStrategy. ." — Jonathan Wegener , Founder, Timehop and ExitStrategy. Hiring Poorly.

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Cofounder Technical Review Startup Software Review 111

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Oh sure, founders work 60-80-hour weeks, but not employees. These are generally bigger, more dysfunctional companies with 25-page Master Service Agreements and complex, ever-changing requirements (though no acceptance of “agile&# or “lean&# ). Is consulting really that bad? The trick is to avoid all these traps.

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America Employee Hiring HTML 330

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 11, 2015

by Eyal Shinar, CEO & Founder of Fundbox. That’s because today’s business world moves faster than ever, and organizations need to be agile in order to adapt to it quickly. Everything big must first be small. The largest, most successful businesses today were once small, start-ups with grand visions.

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Technical Review Small Business Entrepreneur Pennsylvania 100

YoungUpstarts

JULY 30, 2015

No new business is worth starting in these times unless it can go global.” – Sir Richard Branson, founder, Virgin Group. 4] International Finance Corporation, World Bank ( [link] ). [5] 6] International Finance Corporation, World Bank ( [link] ). [7] 3] Varian, H., 5] FedEx GCR 2014. [6] 8] Chironga, M. 9] Varian, H.,

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The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

I also want to explain that it is possible to have a truly agile work environment based on small, autonomous teams. It’s completely up to them if they want to listen or ignore outside advice – even if it’s from one of the founders. Being agile. This is only possible by having great people. Conclusion.

Software Review 146

Software Review Agile Analytics SCRUM 146

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model? Where Are the Customers?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 241

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018

by Shishir Dubey , founder and CEO of ChromeInfotech. Then you figure out all the finances. Then you decide which development methodology to follow – traditional or agile. Shishir Dubey is the founder and CEO of ChromeInfotech , making mobile apps affordable and simple for small and enterprise businesses.

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Mobile Developer Social Media Later Stage 113

The Next Web

NOVEMBER 17, 2013

In order to find out, I asked a panel of 12 successful founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question: What are the pros/cons of hiring an agency to do development work, vs. having all your technical talent in house? Andrew Schrage , Money Crashers Personal Finance. . And at what price?

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Hiring Developer Startup LLC 145

Hearpreneur

FEBRUARY 18, 2024

Thanks to Silvia Borges, Regional Rural Finance Brokers ! #2- Instead, I relied on agility and adaptability. Being the founder of Urban Organic Yield and a gardening expert, I find immense joy in seeing a seed transform into a blooming plant. 13- Staying nimble and pivoting when necessary Photo Credit: Michael E.

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View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Given the common challenges encountered by founders as they navigate through this hiring decision, I thought I’d outline some of my thoughts below that can hopefully serve as a simple framework when it comes to making the first Analytics hire at your startup. Analytics vs. Finance?—?what’s what’s the difference (and what do you need)?

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Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup. Agile Development, meet Agile Business. Any ongoing work that can be described in a written process can be outsourced to a VA and save incredible amounts of time for the founders.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

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.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? How do we finance the company, etc. How Does Customer Development, Agile Development and Lean Startups Fit? What’s the distribution channel.

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

Cheered on by finance professors, Wall Street analysts, investors and hedge funds, companies have learned how to make metrics like Internal Rate of Return look great by one; outsourcing everything, two, getting assets off their balance sheet, and three only investing in things that pay off fast. Act Like a Startup. This never ends well.

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Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 326

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. While these theories explain how to think about innovation in a company they didn’t tell you how to make it happen. Fast forward to today. Do it Again!?

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Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Version One Ventures

JUNE 26, 2018

Most of the situations and questions are occurring for the first time, and founders need to quickly decide what’s best for the company. This makes for super fast decisions – and mostly right decisions if the intuitions of the founders are good. HR, finance, etc.). Process takes over judgment for a few reasons.

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Agile Founder Finance Management 87

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

The processes used to organize and implement the search for the business model are Customer Development and Agile Development. Unlike existing companies that fire executives when they fail to match a plan, we keep the founders and change the model. Customer and Agile Development are the processes to search and build the model.

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. The first step in Customer Development was Customer Discovery ; extracting hypotheses from the business plan and getting the founders out of the building to test the hypotheses in front of customers.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

The Next Web

AUGUST 26, 2012

Keep the team small, agile and up-to-date. One person cannot be the best lawyer, product developer, finance person, user experience designer, visual designer, business developer and sales person all at once. KPI’s are different for each start-up. The trick is to find yours as quickly as possible.

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Bankruptcy Technical Review Intellectual Property Due Diligence 121

The Next Web

MARCH 2, 2014

External constraints or the lacks of resources (finance, skills, business idea) are relative minor reasons. There are opportunities to get a feel for running a team, validating an idea, choosing co-founders. So you learn to be agile, to take it in your stride, to pivot based on the shortcomings of your competitors.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

.” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Agile project management. agile product management. Agile eLearning.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Go on an agile diet quickly. More on that in a moment.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Software By Rob

AUGUST 24, 2011

Karl is a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience who specializes in agile web development and web services integrations. Since I already had an interest in Personal Finance, I was very familiar with many of the blogs around the topic, which is where I first learned of RCA’s years earlier. Founder, MicroMaximus.

Software Review 65

Software Review Software Startup Finance 65

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

APRIL 11, 2018

They are talking about everyone who chooses to be self-employed – from a corner food vendor without a high school diploma to a high-tech founder with a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford.). (By the way, as you read the conclusions keep in mind the authors are not talking just about high-tech entrepreneurs. They found: Signaling.

Entrepreneur 336

Entrepreneur Business Model Capital Gains Aggregator 336

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. A veteran board can bring 50-100x more experience into a board meeting than a first time founder. From a founder’s point of view there are three reasons for board meetings.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 292

blog.simeonov.com

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I have been thinking a lot recently about how to apply agile development principles to investing and key aspects of startup development such as team building. Both stem from the agile principle of delaying decisions until the last responsible moment. The first post is about agile startup fundraising. Urban legends.

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Founder Vesting Agile Startup 44