Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. Reply Karma in the Lean Startup Era , on January 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm Said: [.]

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

This post is admittedly the outcome of a conversation with a few people over some beers. The conversation centered around a founder who's key question is "Where Do I Find a Developer for My Startup? Tech Events / Meetups - There are lots of Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California that are techie oriented.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. The first question to ask is: “Does your startup have market risk or is it dominated by technical risk?” Lean Startup /Customer Development is used to find answers to the unknowns about customers and markets.

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

This post is admittedly the outcome of a conversation with a few people over some beers. The conversation centered around a founder who's key question is "Where Do I Find a Developer for My Startup? Tech Events / Meetups - There are lots of Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California that are techie oriented.

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Austin Startup

MAY 8, 2018

California is way harsher than elsewhere in the country. And the converse is true as well. Finally, as much as I appreciate keeping things lean, moving fast, and skirting the rules where the costs are low, realize that violating laws around employee compensation and hiring/firing can burn you, badly.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

Nearly two years since CA governor Jerry Brown signed the California Fair Pay Act which was designed to close the wage gap, women in Silicon Valley still report that their multi-billion dollar tech giant employers are still paying them less than their male counterparts for equal work (Larson). ComputerScience.org , 2017, [link].

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. As a pay-per-click marketer, now I will look at retail packaging as a source of ideas on landing page design. That’s 10x what many websites convert.

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VC Cafe

DECEMBER 1, 2015

So-called after the California Gold Rush where the purveyors of picks and shovels made a killing (whereas the outcome for prospectors was mixed), the picks and shovels of machine intelligence are hardware, data feeds, and (arguably) the algorithms themselves. It’s not uncharted territory?—?if Pick and Shovel’ plays.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 22, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple , Google, or wherever you like to download podcasts. Here's my conversation with Lenore Estrada. We talked about how her background has made her well-suited for this kind of civic engagement, her relationship to the tech world, how she scaled the organization so quickly and much more.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

I might have pursued a humanities education at a “ kumbaya college ” in California, but it’s only human to be at least a little bit selfish! These managers have a tendency to steamroll conversations. Be sure to take each conversation in the direction of the specific job for which you are applying.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple , Google, or wherever you like to download podcasts. In addition, a complete transcript of our conversation follows the show resources below. His main message throughout all of this, Let's not waste the opportunity this time.Here's my conversation with Alpha Lee. Alpha Lee : Yeah.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 22, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts , Google podcasts , or wherever else you like to download podcasts. Here's my conversation with Raylene and Jen. My parents and my brother live in Southern California. Their tech teams are doing essential work to support public servants in their crisis responses efforts.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

We had some great conversations in the car, but one stuck in my mind. We started in North Carolina eating BBQ and enjoying the Southern culture, went through Washington D.C It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2018

I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation as much as I did. A power company wants to know whether they should be burning natural gas or taking power off of the solar grid because it's sunny in Southern California. It’s hard to have that conversation with anyone who hasn’t really lived inside a company of this size.

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Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 10, 2018

” I might also add because it may come up in conversation, he is a professional athlete, two time cancer survivor, and US Marine veteran. I enlisted in the Marine Corps at the tender age of 17 and got stationed in California. When I was California, I went to continue … I was doing karate at the time.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Now I mention this conversation not because the objection was dumb, but because objections like these happen all the time when you’re brainstorming. I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?” “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer.

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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.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. And the converse is true; Palm would have failed, burning through all their cash, using Handspring’s strategy.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

From there, the conversation took a different trajectory. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. Anybody else got some other ideas?&# It was definitely a “Zen moment&# for me in terms of my career.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Customer Development to Reduce Risk Conversely, if you’re in a startup where the greatest set of risks are about failing to find the right customers/markets you would look for processes to reduce those risks. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that.

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www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Service companies are increasingly looking to get into work-for-equity relationships," says Peter Wendell , managing director of the Menlo Park , California -based venture capital firm Sierra Ventures and a faculty member at Stanford Business School. But Ive definitely had to lean on Dave. Graham liked the idea.

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keen.io

FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Kirk was leaning towards a high-risk, high-equity option, and Micah was somewhere between Kirk and me. Kirk was still unsure if he should be considering the offer at all, which for him meant leaving a new VP-track job at Amazon, giving back a signing bonus, and moving to California. You shouldn’t be doing this for the money.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2020

They created a program called Onward California in partnership with the State of California and with the support of governor Newsom. Their model in California was so successful they eventually created a new organization, Onward US, dedicated to putting American workers displaced by COVID-19 back to work.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born. Our conversation went like this: Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported? When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. Conversion ideas? I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2020

The stories he told me during our conversation, somber as they are, show the truth of that belief. You can listen to our conversation on Apple podcasts , Google podcasts , or wherever you like to download. Here's my conversation with Carl Liebert. He shared his reflections on why these approaches work. It's member-owned.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 21, 2019

I don’t think it’s possible to have this conversation without acknowledging the privilege of being able to go full-time on a role that pays $0 right now. These types of stats are the beginning of much bigger conversations about mental health, burn-out and hustle culture? I will emphasize the deliberate piece?—?look It’s a process.

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 15, 2010

You can’t help but lean forward and want to hear what the next line is. And for fuck sake be ready for the “ask” – If you get far enough in your conversation that you’re pretty convinced that you’ve earned the interest of your other party and if you know that there is something that they can do to help then ask. I buy dead magazines.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 11, 2019

Among her early investments are Lyft, TaskRabbit and Modcloth, which, as our recent conversation shows, are only part of the reason Forbes called her “the most powerful woman in startups.” Ann will be speaking at this year’s Lean Startup Conference in October about all of this and more.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 28, 2020

With the theme “Build Back Better” Jerry Engel , Pete Newell , Steve Weinstein and I co-hosted nearly 500 Lean Educators from 63 countries and 235 universities online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about educators on how we can help our communities rebound, adjust, and recover. — Background.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

When you are presenting to a VC there are two conversations going on – the one you are presenting and the one that investors are thinking as they are listening to your presentation. (If Your presentation doesn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 10, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple , Google, or wherever you like to download podcasts. Here's my conversation with Sal Khan. I remember really vividly maybe in the first week of the Shelter in Place Order, I think even before the schools had officially closed, we had a conversation. Sal Khan : My name is Sal Khan.

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Up and Running

DECEMBER 2, 2015

Negotiate your overhead for lower rates to help you get through the lean years when you are still building your company.” As CEO of a California biotech company, it is critical that I have speedy responses to my submissions and queries.” Chat with other business owners, watch people and strike up conversations.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

And I started to panic as it dawns on me that this conversation is occurring 30 times the 300 people in each of the 30 squadrons on this airbase. But that was the cue for 10 more people simultaneously to burst out with questions, (“How about motorcycles will they be OK? Can we go to the bathroom when the gravity is turned off?”)

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