Steve Blank

APRIL 21, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Their week 6 business model now looked like this: . Their goal is to deploy CarrotBot this week in the farm fields in Avenal, California, on the way to the World Ag Expo. All that we expected.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Technology | Tagged: Customer Development , Early Stage Startup , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Steve Blank « SuperMac War Story 6: Building The Killer Team – Mission, Intent and Values Story Behind “The Secret History” Part IV: Library Hours at an Undisclosed Location » 17 Responses Michael F.

Silicon Valley 307

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

And how thinking of a solution to this commonly used model’s failures led to a new model – the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup activities outside the building. Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But at times it’s why entrepreneurs can sink their own companies. More on this in later posts.)

Customer 216

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Our business model changed as we realized that to become a large company, we needed to automate more than just a few marketers. We had validated our new assumptions by a set of orders, and we had pivoted on our business model. As a young entrepreneur in his first startup, this post hits our current situation spot on.

Silicon Valley 253

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

And I remind them that they should be bringing some type of domain expertise (technical or business) to the table. Other Roles in a Startup Generic advice given to entrepreneurs assumes that everyone is going to be the founder/co-founder. By now the company may have found and settled on a repeatable business model.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. There’s lots of lore, emotion, and misconceptions of what VC’s do or don’t do for entrepreneurs. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Part 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. The tools and techniques available to small businesses on Main Street are the same ones that were being used for the last 75 years. Serendipity.

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Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 311

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

If you’ve tried to slog your way through my book on Customer Development you know that I’m insistent that the founders need to be the ones getting outside the building (physically or virtually) to validate all the initial hypotheses of the business model and product. were the first computer entrepreneurs here.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

So I was astonished how ready and eager students were for a class that combines the toughest problems in national security, with learning Lean Innovation methods. We had more applicants (70+) for the 32 seats in this class than we usually get in our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. Result: Hell yes.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

So I was astonished how ready and eager students were for a class that combines the toughest problems in national security, with learning Lean Innovation methods. We had more applicants (70+) for the 32 seats in this class than we usually get in our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. Result: Hell yes.

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Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. This is incisive and powerful and I hope many entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs “get&# this eloquently stated point. There is no certainty about a startup on day-one.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 22, 2020

Digital Response (USDR) CalFresh Onward California Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) "President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1935-1944" SF New Deal donation/volunteer page Transcript for Out of the Crisis #15: SF New Deal Eric Ries : This is Out of the Crisis, I'm Eric Ries.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2015

Errol Arkilic was the lead program director for the National Science Foundation I-Corps , which uses my Lean LaunchPad curriculum to teach scientists and engineers how to take their technology out of the lab and into the marketplace. The Lean LaunchPad class. But nothing else like [The Lean LaunchPad class] was being taught. .

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 11, 2020

A subsegment of those instructors – those trying to teach Lean LaunchPad, whether in I-Corps, or Hacking for Defense – have an additional burden of figuring out how to teach a class that depends on students getting out of the building and talking to 10 to 15 customers a week. Here’s what we learned. And so it began.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

– Cornell University; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University; and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego. A entrepreneur’s idea of closure. And taxpayers are only out $35M on that one machine. What a deal.

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Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 210

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Entrepreneur -“Well no but my product is much better than their product and I have this great idea….” We’re about to ship next week.”

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

BMNT , a new Silicon Valley company, is combining the Lean Methods it learned in combat with the technology expertise and speed of startups. The University of California managed research and development of the bomb design at Los Alamos while the US Army managed the Los Alamos facilities and the overall administration of the project.

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Up and Running

JANUARY 22, 2015

In the last year alone, several have opened across the United States, with cafes in New York City, Oakland, California, and soon, Portland Oregon. The cat cafe business model is incredibly new, and as such, there is much less in the way of a road map for these entrepreneurs to follow. they are treading on very new ground.

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Portland Entrepreneur United States Oakland 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Innovation – Business Model? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Others you need to know when you execute the plan. Here is the list of basic startupactivities/functions our class discussion generated: Opportunity – How big? Where do the ideas come from? Technology? Customers – Who are the Users? Who are the economic buyers? New/Disruptive?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Small Business Success | Mondays and Thursdays. The Goods: Your Business Toolbox | Thursdays. Todays Small Business News | Daily. Entrepreneur news from reporter Eric Markowitz. In the 1990s, Graham was one of those entrepreneurs giving away equity in exchange for crucial services. Finance | Tuesdays. Newsletters.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The 11 Harsh Realities Of Being An Entrepreneur - OnStartups , November 1, 2010 There's always talk about the end game in the form of an acquisition, funding announcement, or eventual flame out. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world. This doesn’t make sense.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static. Of course HP did ship new products and innovate, but their center of innovation was sustaining innovation , around the core of their existing business. Ben Reply Jerry Ji , on June 22, 2009 at 1:39 pm Said: Peter Drucker: Entrepreneurs need to be more managerial.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 21, 2019

A 2013 study of 5000 entrepreneurs spanning different age group over 15 years to see if it was better to keep your day job. The rhetoric around “if you’re not full-time, you’re not doing enough” can sometimes get pretty overwhelming, and excludes large groups of amazing entrepreneurs which I think can be a problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 11, 2019

Ann will be speaking at this year’s Lean Startup Conference in October about all of this and more. I was in California at that point, where there were a handful of women, which to me was already really inspirational. We want to treat the entrepreneur's project or company not as a deal but as if it is our own life's work as well.

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Founder Lean Venture Capital Cofounder 68

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. I offered to introduce him to the firm whose Entrepreneur-in-Residence offer I had just accepted.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

www.usatoday.com

JULY 16, 2012

After years of the San Francisco Bay Area dominating the tech start-up scene, with huge smashes such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, entrepreneurs are finding they can go elsewhere to grow and prosper. It takes awhile for the financial people to catch up with the entrepreneurs." Americas new business model: Sharing.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

You know you have achieved product/market fit when you start getting orders (or users, eyeballs or whatever your criteria for success was in your business model.) At best it is a way to inform an entrepreneurs instinct and reduce risk. Is our solution compelling enough that they want to buy it or use it today? It’s an art.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core&# entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing. I’ve been surprised at the data. Comments and brickbats welcomed.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

For those of you who don’t know, business plan competitions are held by universities who get their students to enter and compete to see who has the best business idea. In exchange, these VCs/companies get early looks at new deal flow and offer aspiring entrepreneurs feedback and advice on their business plan.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 156

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Believing Your Own BS is Toxic Lots of noise and smoke before a product ships seems to be a toxic byproduct of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. Hype before shipping any product is an obvious flaw, but what about hyping products that have shipped but have zero business model? Rocket Science seems to be a bit of an extreme case though.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. Entrepreneurs who have experience in the vertical market they’re entering do this analysis automatically. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0, Order Here.

Vertical 156

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

Startups were not just smaller versions of a large company, they were about invention, innovation and iteration - of business model, product, customers and on and on. Unbeknownst to me, I was facing a choice between becoming an entrepreneur or working for a large company. I could see myself doing that – soon.

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