Steve Blank

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

He just hired Meg Whitman. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money. the ex-CEO of HP and eBay, as CEO of NewTV. Then one day it was over.

Lean 335
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The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup

Steve Blank

The questions every startup or small business CEO needs to ask now are: What’s my Burn Rate and Runway? Burn Rate and Runway. To answer the first question, take stock of your current gross burn rate i.e. how much cash are you spending each month. What does your new business model look like? How do you know?

Burn Rate 436
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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

Speed keeps cash burn rate down while allowing you to converge on a repeatable and scalable business model. And that he could identify the resources needed, (outsourced contract developers who could build it for him) and he would hire a partner to do so. In a startup building MVP’s is what turns theory into practice.

Cofounder 336
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It Must Be A Marketing Problem

Steve Blank

Six is a Proxy for Burn Rate. Later I realized six salespeople without revenue to match was a proxy for an out of control burn rate that now had the boards serious attention. With that initial sales “success” they began to hire and staff the sales department per the ”plan.” How many salespeople do you have?”

Burn Rate 248
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Failure and Redemption

Steve Blank

90 days later, I found out our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash. We hired everyone according to our plan. This can’t be happening to me. Stage 2: Deny any of it was your fault.

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Failure and Redemption

Steve Blank

90 days later, I found out our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash. We hired everyone according to our plan. This can’t be happening to me. Stage 2: Deny any of it was your fault.

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Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better Way

Steve Blank

Surprisingly we have never explicitly articulated or understood that what’s really happening when we hire a new VP or CEO in a startup is that the newly hired executive is implicitly pivoting (radically changing) some portion of the business model. We were changing the business model when we changed executives.

Burn Rate 247