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Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank

“No,” my friend replied, sadly shaking his head, “the rest of the board said it sounded like a good idea.”. With a few more questions I learned that the code base, which had now grown large, still had vestiges of the original exploratory code written back in the early days when the company was in the discovery phase of Customer Development.

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Lean Meets Wicked Problems

Steve Blank

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves. while proposing minimal viable solutions.

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Relentless – The Difference Between Motion And Action

Steve Blank

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Not a trivial job considering our computer was one of the first parallel architectures, and our compiler required specific knowledge of our vector architecture to get the most out of it. Me: How about Dyna 3D ?

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

The rest of the vertical marketing recruits had similar backgrounds (and similar careers.) (I never could find one from the petroleum industry so I wore that hat along with the VP of Marketing title.) Our head of finite element analysis came from General Motor’s Chevy division, where he headed up one of their analysis groups. (He

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SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

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. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

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The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

Steve Blank

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 21: Grant Warner

Steve Blank

While finding product-market fit is important, getting the rest of the business model right is the difference between and a great demo and a great business. We did a lot of talking to customers, trying to understand who really had the need. That helped us develop a product. . Grant Warner. Clips from his interview are below.

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