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Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. That has changed in the last few years.

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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. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. The mantra of “ first mover advantage ,” the idea that winners are the ones who are the first entrants in their market, became the conventional wisdom of investors in Silicon Valley.“

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Practical Strategies For Starting A Business

Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch (02:29): So I'm curious, how did you get into the business of advising startups? Well, Steve Hoffman (02:34): First of all, I did three venture funded startups in Silicon valley and two bootstrap startups. You know, could you look at my business plan? So I know what it's like. You put it out there.

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The Leading Cause of Startup Death – Part 1: The Product.

Steve Blank

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. While these objectives provide an illusion of progress, in reality they do little to validate the business plan hypotheses about customers and what they will buy.

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When It Comes To Entrepreneurship, Age 40 Is The New 20… And Always Has Been

YoungUpstarts

Schramm, author of “ Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do “ If I asked you to describe the prototypical successful entrepreneur, you may share a story mythologized in our culture of a brilliant young man with an idea so good and so disruptive that he just can’t waste any time finishing college.