Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I know this will fall like a lead balloon to the many people who believe it is possible to have a [insert: startup incubator or technology accelerator or technology consultant or outsource firm] build your technology. The best technologists often aren’t amazing people managers. The VP Engineering aspires to manage teams.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. Eventually Qualcomm did create a corporate incubator to handle projects beyond the scope of traditional R&D, yet too early to hand-off to existing business unit).

Programming 269

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 269

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

OCTOBER 1, 2020

The time to invest in innovation agility is now. I consulted with management to focus a rapid innovation process effort. I facilitated a group of entrepreneurs for “The NIIC” (an amazing incubator and economic development center in Fort Wayne, IN) and I used my Innovation MoshPit process. Two Real World Examples.

Incubator 117

Incubator Technical Review Agile Technology 117

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

In addition to super angels, incubators like Y Combinator , TechStars and the 100+ plus others worldwide like them have begun to formalize seed-investing. The emergence of incubators and super angels have dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. Entrepreneurship as It’s Own Management Science.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Here’s the story of one such team; Jonathan Wylie, Lakshmi Shivalingaiah and the Evoke team.

Lean 319

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 319

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 17, 2019

His books include “ The Change Champion’s Field Guide “, “ Best Practices in Talent Management ” and “ In Great Company: How to Spark Peak Performance by Creating an Emotionally Connected Workplace ” (McGraw-Hill Education, February 21, 2019). We reach over 500,000 management professionals.

Software Review 124

Software Review Leadership France Cofounder 124

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

What this means is that the emergence of incubators and super angels have dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. We now have specific management tools to grow startups. Their need to get into high-profile deals has driven late-stage valuations into unicorn territory. VCs have now ceded more control to founders.

Restful 238

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 238

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. Its purpose was to educate management on best practices to run existing companies. Here’s why and what we did about it. that took place in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Gust

OCTOBER 29, 2014

This timely information is complemented by searchable, user-managed profiles of every startup, investor, incubator, and accelerator in NYC. Every resource with an address is also integrated into a unified map , where users can peruse the City’s resources in relation to where they live or work.

Early Stage 133

Early Stage Technical Review New York Deal Flow 133

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

A founder’s lack of credibility/experience in growing and managing a large company hindered a company that wanted to go public. However, there was no way for founders to share this information with other founders (this was life before the Internet, incubators and accelerators).

Founder 269

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 269

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

MARCH 19, 2019

Make it a project that allows people time to do research and think, incubate , and your results will dramatically improve. The session/project will be better planned and managed, and some of your best brains can join the team in jamming ideas instead of managing process. The danger and the reality is they check out.

Framework 54

Framework Agile Chicago Incubator 54

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 31, 2018

In many respects, it’s the leanness, flexibility and agility of startups that help them become successful,” he says. On the other hand, startups are often the first adopters of the latest technologies, especially around operational and productivity tools, digital marketing and customer relationship management.

United Kingdom 113

United Kingdom Technical Review Design Operations 113

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

But the world you lead will be much different from the one your professors knew or your predecessors managed. Yet in the face of all this change, traditional firms continue to embrace a management ethos that values efficiency over innovation. To manage these employees companies create metrics to control, measure and reward execution.

Private Equity 328

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 328

Steve Blank

AUGUST 25, 2015

“Most of the time our attempts at innovation result in “innovation theater” – lots of motion (memos from our CEO, posters in the cafeteria, corporate incubators) but no real change. We were once a scrappy, agile and feared organization with a “can-do” attitude. That really brought home the stark difference between our two worlds.

Lean 120

Lean Entrepreneur Business Model Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. While I had managed to persuade two great VC’s to teach the class with me ( Jon Feiber and Ann Miura-ko ), what if I was wasting their time?

Lean 303

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 303

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. We now have the tools, technology and data to take incubators and accelerators to the next level. We think we can do better.

Oakland 329

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Product management tools like Stage-Gate ® emerged to systematically manage Waterfall product development.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2011

I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program , spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Division. Applied engineering (top 10 annual challenges from the mining companies).

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley Chile South America Venture Capital 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2019

The easy part is, “Let’s have an incubator.” With the nature of work changing, the core skills entrepreneurs need to know to become practitioners are actually core skills that everybody will need to know to get a job: creativity, agility, resilience, tenacity, curiosity. A third is incubators and makers’ spaces.

Incubator 332

Incubator Lean Programming Government 332

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

I know this will fall like a lead balloon to the many people who believe it is possible to have a [insert: startup incubator or technology accelerator or technology consultant or outsource firm] build your technology. The best technologists often aren’t amazing people managers. The VP Engineering aspires to manage teams.

Fractional VPE 89

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

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

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Eric’s insight was that traditional product management and Waterfall development should be replaced by Agile Development. Business model design + customer development + agile development is the process that startups use to search for a business model. Having Eric in the class was the best investment I ever made. Lessons Learned.

Lean 291

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 291

Steve Blank

AUGUST 4, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy is a new course from the Management Science and Engineering department in Stanford’s Engineering school and Stanford’s International Policy Studies program that will be first offered in the Fall of 2016. The management of all these relationships is called diplomacy. Real Problems. Lessons Learned.

Lean 164

Lean Government Agile Africa 164

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2015

My guests this past week on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Pete Newell , managing partner of BMNT Partners. Matt Weingart, program development manager in the Strategic Development Office at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Listen to my entire chat with John.

Channel 120

Channel Japan Bosnia Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Eric’s insight was that traditional product management and Waterfall development should be replaced by Agile Development. Business model design + customer development + agile development is the process that startups use to search for a business model. Having Eric in the class was the best investment I ever made. Lessons Learned.

Lean 183

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 183

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

With the pace of innovation increasing, and powerful new tools—such as cloud storage of big data sets and machine learning algorithms for mining that data—now affordable and accessible to even fledgling start-ups, even the most powerful incumbents, such as Walmart and Microsoft, must learn to be more agile in both product development and marketing.

Technical Review 127

Technical Review Algorithm Channel Analytics 127

Steve Blank

AUGUST 4, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy is a new course from the Management Science and Engineering department in Stanford’s Engineering school and Stanford’s International Policy Studies program that will be first offered in the Fall of 2016. The management of all these relationships is called diplomacy. Real Problems. Lessons Learned.

Lean 120

Lean Government Agile Africa 120

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Task Management. Project Management Tools. Subscription Payments / Management. Managing APIs. Customer Relationship Management. Contractor Management. Private beta invitations & management: Prefinery. Scanning / Document Management. Project Management tools. Part 4- Closing.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Every summer, they bring approximately 10 companies to Boulder for an intense "accelerator" experience (dont call it an incubator, or youll get dirty looks). Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. I was really overwhelmed this time. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

NZ Entrepreneur

OCTOBER 8, 2020

Innovation sprints, hackathons, and other rapid, agile problem-solving and prototyping approaches may seem like the antithesis of the academic approach to research. This is often described as desktop research and is a critical step in incubating an innovation. Put simply, PhD graduates are highly-trained experts in research.

Agile 52

Agile Canada Incubator Government 52

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2016

First was to teach students to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to make decisions at speed and with urgency in a chaotic and uncertain world. This is a first step to a more agile, responsive and resilient, approach to national security in the 21 st century. What Were Our Goals for this Class?

Agile 120

Agile Security Audio Video 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

As part of the Department of Defense, the NGA acquires technology and information systems through the traditional DOD’s acquisition system – which has been described as the antitheses of rapid customer discovery and agile practices. However, this is a learning opportunity and a great beginning for the Department of Defense. Lessons Learned.

Lean 181

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 181

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

As part of the Department of Defense, the NGA acquires technology and information systems through the traditional DOD’s acquisition system – which has been described as the antitheses of rapid customer discovery and agile practices. However, this is a learning opportunity and a great beginning for the Department of Defense. Lessons Learned.

Lean 181

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 181

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 3, 2009 Lean Startup fbFund wrap-up Last week I had a real blast meeting with the companies at the fbFund incubator at Palo Alto. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? As usual, Id like to post the slides and then offer some additional commentary.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

Or if a CEO proudly boast about their corporate incubator, but the incubator’s parking lot is empty at 5:15 pm. In Horizon 1 and 2 companies (those that execute or extend current business models), stories revolve around heroes and rebels who manage to get something new done in spite of the existing processes. Lessons Learned.

Startup 120

Startup Silicon Valley Incubator Matching 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Unlike other incubator-led programs, this workshop is open to anyone who wants to learn, and it does not require companies take investment or give out equity. We changed our model to B2B and adopted Agile around 2002. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60