Architecture Cofounder Customer Development Sales 
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 5, 2009
I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.
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. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.
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Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 10, 2016
Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 19, 2009
He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.)
Steve Blank
MAY 11, 2009
They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. There was nothing for the consumer to do. It worked great on the slow CPUs at the time.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 27, 2010
In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. The finance system didn’t talk to the sales system which didn’t know the manufacturing system even existed. Founder Too. You’re An Idiot.
Startup Lessons Learned
JULY 29, 2009
For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. Sometimes quick and dirty actually incurs less debt.
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