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Profound Beliefs

Steve Blank

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. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was a great marketer.

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Why the Future of Tesla May Depend on Knowing What Happened to Billy Durant

Steve Blank

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
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Why Build, Measure, Learn – isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work

Steve Blank

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. Waterfall Development was all about execution of the requirements document. Generating Hypotheses.

Lean 120
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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. Product Development Diagram 1.

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Lead and Disrupt

Steve Blank

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. Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? You think startups are hard? The short answer is no.

Incubator 402
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Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. We’re building the wrong product!” 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.

Founder 316
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8 Myths Technologists Believe That Sink Businesses

Startup Professionals Musings

Most technologists have little interest in the mechanics of starting and building a business. That’s why I recommend that they find a co-founder who loves business challenges, including marketing and finance. Outside investors are most interested in scaling a proven business model, not research and development.