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.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild. A former partner in two leading Los Angeles media law firms, Lee holds a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law where he also served as Chief Comment Editor of the UCLA Law Review, and earned his B.A. in History from UCLA.

Los Angeles 85

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review Distribution 85

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Business Model Affects Metrics and Exit Criteria Web-based Business Model Exit Criteria In a web-business model you’re looking for traffic, users, conversion, virality, etc – not revenue.

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

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.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

The San Diego-based startup has developed vertically integrated system that produces a plant-based protein ingredient that can replace egg whites, whey and casein in food and beverage applications. Being on Mars by myself, I don’t know to be honest…. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13-17.

San Diego 62

San Diego Memphis AJAX Netherlands 62

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 20, 2020

Austin has been one the fastest growing cities in the country for the past 20 years that I’ve been here, but it feels like COVID-19 and California wildfires broke the floodgates already under pressure from high taxes and expensive real estate in landlocked coastal cities. He’s also on the board of the Planetary Society and the Arch Mission.

Austin 110

Austin Texas Cofounder Los Angeles 110

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.

North Carolina 143

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ReadWriteStart

MAY 12, 2011

Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. Then Taariq Lewis from San Francisco, California, presented Stanzr, a lightweight online events platform specifically focused on moving qualified leads generated through webinars towards a close. He is seeing excellent results. Following a guerrilla p.r.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Entrepreneur Silicon Valley India 125

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 16, 2010

The trends include Cloud computing, outsourcing, social Web, vertical and local Web, smartphones and tablets, online advertising, online video, online gaming, e-books, and bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Today, the company produces low carbon footprint fruits and vegetables and sells to distributors in California, Nevada and Arizona.

Senegal 117

Senegal Nevada Bootstrapping Silicon Valley 117

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.

Silicon Valley 176

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Austin Startup

MARCH 4, 2018

We’re at a strategic point where our core business is experiencing solid growth and we’re ready to invest in significantly more advanced breathomics sensing and analytics into our roadmap, so we can begin to focus on the specific disease verticals that our data, reach and technology can have the greatest impact for. I attended in 2007.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco Startup China India 48

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?

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

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.

Silicon Valley 120

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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.

Silicon Valley 324

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 324

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

And the converse is true; Palm would have failed, burning through all their cash, using Handspring’s strategy. The lesson is that even with essentially identical products and team, Handspring would have failed if it had used the same sales and marketing strategy that Palm had used so successfully. Market Type changes everything.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

It seems like businesses who focus on finding their repeatable and scalable sales model first get to revenue more quickly and the funding conversation becomes much easier. I see a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs waste too much time chasing money rather than figuring this out first.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

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?”)

Silicon Valley 209

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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 What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking? If they’re not busy looking at their Blackberry’s/iPhone’s.)

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

Partnerships with innovative global companies in major industry verticals provide unique opportunities for customer validation, pilot programs and strategic investment. Texas exports more than California and New York combined. Only California and New York have more. Digital and technology startups are global from day one.

Texas 97

Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2019

Therefore, we can create almost any arbitrary glow spectrum, for example, to mimic the late summer sun in a specific location like Northern California. Once you have the content down, then can you relax and be conversational, with good jokes. The key to a well-received pitch is to make it feel conversational and insert natural humor.

Technical Review 54

Technical Review Startup Harvest Advisory Board 54

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. 2 weeks in they had outsourced my job, which lead to an awkward conversation. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. Driving across the U.S.

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. Armstrong was a god!

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

They could have started with the hypothesis they needed both, and then they could have heard customers agreeing, but the next step should have been a “minimum feature set&# -&# product/market fit&# conversation. We might have ended up implementing both byte orders exactly as we did.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) If you are outside of Silicon Valley, you ought to jump into them with both feet. You’ll learn a lot.

Business Plan 140

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 140

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had. Great founders live for these moments. Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment Fast forward three decades back to today.

Founder 297

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

You can listen to the conversation on the Greymatter podcast here. The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. In 2013, California was the only place that had regulations on ride sharing. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT.

Iran 39

Iran Technical Review Non-Compete Lean 39

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. A contemporary analog to this type of vertical integration is Comcast/NBC-U. There are of course other outposts like Austin and Seattle.

Cofounder 277

Cofounder Merger Founder Venture Capital 277

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 16, 2020

One of 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2020 , Virtualitics uses patented technology, based on a decade of research at the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Department of Defense, Nestle and University of Southern California. Tell us your favorite thing about being based in Pasadena, California.

Southern California 67

Southern California Los Angeles California Artificial Inteligence 67

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

For example, if you’re an early-stage SaaS provider that is shifting from a horizontal solution to a vertical focus, your mission, culture, and competencies can stay the same and the pivot transition will probably go smoothly. The converse is also true; companies that fell from grace did so because they failed to pivot.

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Growthink Blog

JUNE 19, 2010

He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild. A former partner in two leading Los Angeles media law firms, Lee holds a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law where he also served as Chief Comment Editor of the UCLA Law Review, and earned his B.A. in History from UCLA.

Los Angeles 76

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review IP 76

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. As a going away gift my roommates got me a joke disguise kit with a fake nose, glasses and mustache.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 270

Austin Startup

JANUARY 10, 2019

This increased speed and capacity will require extensive infrastructure investments including “vertical real estate,” like towers and other tall structures; new data centers to process the increased information load; and much more. But other cities seem to be dragging their feet. So why are cities reluctant to embrace 5G?

San Francisco 58

San Francisco Austin China Vertical 58

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

While this is a conversation that is active and never cliche in the mompreneur world I move in, it’s the first time I’ve heard it so clearly spelled out by a dad. Your wife and kids are lucky.

Entrepreneur 331

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Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

The co-commerce era is here and defined by the 3 C’s – Collaboration, Conversations and Creativity. Footwear brands Nike, Adidas, Converse and Tiger have all done very well bringing back designs from the 1980′s to leverage the trend. Cities are now becoming vertical again.

Uruguay 123

Uruguay Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 123

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks. We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting” trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need.

Silicon Valley 271

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