Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh. And with all of that they had gone broke, out of business and into Chapter 11. Their guess was that they would find value in the high margin graphics business.

Silicon Valley 146

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.) For me this was one of the joys of entrepreneurship – constant learning and new insights.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

See the previous Ardent posts for context.) Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 13, 2008 Five Whys Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. His book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production is a fascinating read, even though its decidedly non-practical. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Heres how it works.

Software Review 167

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

Cofounder 219

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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. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. It would be the company where I actually earned the title. This is the first of a series of posts on the company.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. It’s just a story about what happened to me.

Silicon Valley 225

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. You have to wonder: does the VC you have on your board today have the right skill set to help you succeed in today’s economic environment?

Silicon Valley 217

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 4, 2008 Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for Maples Investments Image via Wikipedia Steve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. My path to lean startups began with Kent Beck and extreme programming.

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.” Market Risk vs.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. And yet I keep returning to PHP as a development platform, as have most of my fellow startup CTOs. But by the time I was building my first websites for commercial use , PHP had taken over.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# A successful startup strives for this latter case. And this is true outside of games.

Customer 156

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building. He was the professor who helped his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard start a company in 1939.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing. Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. The story had universal appeal, and we spun the tale and keep the buzz going.

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

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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. This was just before the IBM PC hit the desktop so there were no “standard” operating systems or applications for desktop platforms.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods. Depending on the size of the venture firm they may have one to three EIR’s who stay an average of a year or so. It really means that the VC’s would like to own a piece of you.

Silicon Valley 120

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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. I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in. That’s when things went south.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss. Not a process I recommend, but one in which the lessons stuck for a lifetime. Read the previous Ardent post for context.) The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. At the same time we were educating the press , we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company.

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Driving across the U.S. is an adventure everyone ought to do. With my offer letter in-hand I reported to ESL’s Human Resources (HR) department.

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

While the Rocket Science press juggernaut moved inexorably forward, a few troubling facts kept trying to bubble up into my consciousness. While the Rocket Science press juggernaut moved inexorably forward, a few troubling facts kept trying to bubble up into my consciousness. That’s OK, because we knew better.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? No, not really. Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? And we lost money when we did so. Therefore, no, we weren’t really equipped to be the low cost provider.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. Most components in a modern data center are completely stateless, meaning they just do batches of work that is handed to them, but dont store any data long-term. Key-based partitioning.

San Francisco 151

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

In this one month we had learned more about desktop publishing on the Mac than any one of our competitors. Now the question was what to do with it. First I need to make sure what we really learned was information we could base a company strategy on.

Silicon Valley 134

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ). I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices. Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. This post, which is divided in two parts, is the story of the first time it happened to me.

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

I learned a lot at Convergent, going from product marketing manager in a small startup to VP of Marketing of the Unix Division as it became a public company. Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.”

Entrepreneur 276

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy happen.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I even had time to find a girlfriend who was a contractor to the company. One of her first comments was, “I didn’t know you even worked here. Where were you hiding?&# If she only knew. What’s the Worst that Can Happen? We four instructors would grumble and complain to one another about our lack of leadership.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

When I work with startups on improving engagement, I really try to emphasize the importance of their most powerful lever: positioning. You can learn more about the event here. Its hosted by Kontagent and sponsored by Intel. Without further ado, here are the slides (feedback welcome!): Its an example of an excellent synthetic notification.

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