VC Cafe

JULY 29, 2012

human engineering VC Cafe Photo credit: By imaginedhorizons (Flickr). ” Question: What is Human Engineering? make a copy of this Google doc template of the Business Model Canvas to re-jig who your users, collaborators, channels and business model(s). Wikipedia ).

Engineer 145

Engineer Technical Review Software Review Startup 145

VC Cafe

JUNE 26, 2023

In the early days of the web, companies like AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler and others competed in becoming the search engine of choice. But two years after Google came to the fore in 1998, Google became the number one search engine and “Googling” has become synonymous with web search.

Generative AI 174

Generative AI Search ChatGPT Technical Review 174

SoCal CTO

MARCH 5, 2007

There are quite a few other Software Development Companies in Southern California working on open source and/or freemium business models. Dr. Karrer was valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30 engineers in the nation, and received a M.S.

Open Source 150

Open Source Business Model Technical Cofounder Southern California 150

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 17, 2011

I put in these particular elements because I did a study of the reasons people cancel at WP Engine , and these are the main reasons for cancellation. For a quality-service company like WP Engine a high cancellation rate is a sign of terminal cancer even if acquisition rates are also increasing, so this metric isn’t useful to us.

Business Model 245

Business Model Metrics Engineer Technical Review 245

SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Kevin Federline Search Engine Just saw a post - Sleep with a pop star, get your own branded search engine. I actually think this is a pretty innovative model. ► February (2) CTO Founders / Cofounders Part-Time Startup CTO? in Computer Science.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Search Engineer 150

View from Seed

JUNE 23, 2022

Founder: Dennis Chim. Influencer Direct puts the tools to create their own eCommerce business directly into the hands of influencers.” Get to know the founders. RH: Founders, please introduce yourselves. . RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? Company: Influencer Direct.

DC 156

DC Cambodia eCommerce Social Media 156

Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 28, 2023

To recap the year, here are some of 2023’s biggest themes for Version One: 1) Building in AI While still early in the AI wave, we’re seeing not only technological innovation but also business model transformation. These companies typically move atoms as well as bits, and while they might not fit the traditional VC model (i.e.

Technical Review 73

Technical Review India Canada Early Stage 73

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2020

It will enable individuals to understand the travellers’ needs and expectations intimately which can result in new hospitality business models. They understand the need to constantly improve in order to develop resilient hospitality business models hand-in-hand with their employers. How would this help cross-industry?

Technical Review 154

Technical Review Singapore Artificial Inteligence Myanmar 154

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

While you are working away on your business plan, looking for ways to raise capital, finding the right people to hire, etc., But have you ever had the opportunity to pick the brains of founders who created amazingly successful startups and companies like Envato , Backblaze , Simple , or Treehouse ? Things snowballed from there.”.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Depending on the composition of the founding team, you might or might not have near-term holes in certain functions at the exec level – e.g. you’ll most likely need to bring on a CTO/VP of Engineering shortly after the seed round if you don’t have a technical co-founder.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

Sloan transformed corporate management into a real profession, and its stellar example was the continuous and relentless execution of the GM business model (until its collapse 50 years later). If you’re following Tesla, you might be interested to know that Sloan wasn’t the founder of GM. What happened to him?

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer. So, almost like clockwork 20 th century startups fired the innovators/founders when they scaled.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Executing both of them would put us out of business. Then march through the rest of the business model.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

VC Cafe

MARCH 4, 2024

With NVIDIA’s Israel-1 AI supercomputer, a broad range of innovative companies in Israel will create AI that can transform the productivity and business models of enterprises around the world.” Kooply , a game development engine in stealth, was of the 20 winners of the 2024 Game Changers list by Lightspeed Ventures.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Cofounder Venture Capital 78

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

Kauffman just launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. After weeks honing the script and days of filming, I’m honored to present the “ Startups ” section of Founders School.

Founder 327

Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

From day one, the founders believe that their vision can change the world. Unlike small business entrepreneurs, their interest is not in earning a living but rather in creating equity in a company that eventually will become publicly traded or acquired, generating a multi-million-dollar payoff. They hire the best and the brightest.

Government 335

Government Silicon Valley Startup Venture Capital 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products. Luckily Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas presents a visual overview of the nine components of a business on one page.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Instead the business press dumped on the founders for “selling out.” Many founders mentioned this as a reason not to incorporate or grow their companies in Finland. Lessons Learned.

Finland 324

Finland Naming Russia Government 324

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 4, 2019

The first post drilled down into the often-overlooked notion of “market-engineering” and why it’s so critical. Key components of revenue architecture go beyond simply predicting sales to include: the name and attributes of the startup’s category, a messaging matrix, a pricing strategy, a sales strategy and other business model elements.

Framework 118

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 118

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2020

A business plan is the outward facing definition of the business you hope to drive with your hardware solution, with a hardware overview in the intro to highlight customer value and competitiveness. If possible, quantify these in non-technical business terms, such as dollars saved or replacement costs over time.

Business Plan 423

Business Plan Product Intellectual Property Elevator Pitch 423

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. And they also recognize that simply exploiting their existing assets, capabilities, and business models is insufficient for long-term survival.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. Teaching In the Big Apple.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 270

YoungUpstarts

MAY 24, 2019

The first post drilled down into the often-overlooked notion of “market-engineering” and why it’s so critical. Key components of revenue architecture go beyond simply predicting sales to include: the name and attributes of the startup’s category, a messaging matrix, a pricing strategy, a sales strategy and other business model elements.

Framework 104

Framework Architecture Cleveland Early Stage 104

YoungUpstarts

JULY 25, 2019

by Rick Mac Gillis , founder and CEO of Dragon Cloud , author of “ The New Frontier In Web Api Programming “ Startups, more than any other type of business, are sensitive to change. Use freelance platforms to connect with talent, then contract those who fit your business model outside the confines of the intermediary.

Hiring 104

Hiring Software Review Startup API 104

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I worked with engineering to try to find product/market fit ( big endian or little endian ?) and get the chip designed into companies building engineering workstations – powerful personal computers, all while trying to refine how to find the right markets, customers, and sales process. Declare them cultural co-founders.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. A Pivot a Week. he’d declare. “We

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Part 3: Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster. Few entrepreneurs find this scalable and repeatable business model because it’s not easy. Focus on capital efficient, scalable startups and founders.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

In addition to Nand, the class also heard from Chris Lynch, founder of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), now the CEO of Rebellion Defense, a new vendor of AI to the DOD. This is where I brought in the thinking of how we build businesses here in Silicon Valley. We needed to be building leveraged business models in scale.

Artificial Inteligence 388

Artificial Inteligence Fractional CTO Technology CTO 388

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Founders fit the definition of a creator: they see something no one else does. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. While companies execute business models, startups search for a business model. (Or Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.).

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2019

In the first post , we drilled down into the often-overlooked notion of “market-engineering” and why it’s so critical. In two of these three phases – the first and third – volumes of helpful information and numerous organizations are readily available to help guide and support founders of startups. Mind the Traction Gap? Go-to-Scale.

Cleveland 127

Cleveland Framework Marketing Early Stage 127

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2018

It’s the engine that has powered companies including Amazon, Alibaba, and Google. As Hoffman has put it, if starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down, scaling is like “assembling that plane faster then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines, while still building the wings.”

Lean 103

Lean Las Vegas Cofounder Startup 103

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

Engineer 305

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique. Tom Bedecarré , the founder and CEO of AKQA, the leading digital advertising agency. He runs H4X Labs. Jeff served in the U.S.

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 20, 2016

Thus the top priority of every entrepreneur who wants funding should be to build and highlight their “dream team” of co-founders, executives and advisers, to attract the biggest and best investors. Fundable entrepreneurs have to feel comfortable talking and listening to engineers, financial people, marketing and especially customers.

Sweat Equity 152

Sweat Equity Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch Software Review 152

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 4, 2017

Varsha not only invests but also provides operating and strategic advice based on her experiences as a former founder and operating executive. Sam Decker is the founder of Mass Relevance, Clearhead and Mashbox so he is in the perfect position to help entrepreneurs. Mark Andreessen. Sam Decker.

Angel Investor 185

Angel Investor Entrepreneur Software Engineering Operations 185