Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 Product Development Diagram 1. release of the product.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes. This is basic enough that I don’t think anyone can argue with it – reduce the cost of mistakes.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2021

A provider of low-cost health clinics across the country, Carbon Health was also on the frontlines when the COVID pandemic hit--and even understood what was coming long before most people in the U.S. Carbon Health is a provider of low-cost health clinics across the country. They had to decide whether and how to respond. EB : Yeah.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Turkey Los Angeles California 60

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

At first only the national laboratories and the largest companies could afford to buy supercomputers, (the Cray-1 cost ~$9 million) but over time scientists and researchers were also starting to use them. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~ 2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. through the Lean Launchpad class. He sits on the House committee that oversees the NSF - the Science, Space and Technology committee (a place where his engineering degree and PhD comes in handy.)

America 241

America Rhode Island Southern California Illinois 241

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.)

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 329

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 329

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

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

A recent job posting by zlien , a construction industry software company, frames the product manager’s mindset this way: Do you find yourself staring at a complex world and identifying problems to engineer away? so that the talent, the designers, engineers, analysts and data scientists, can focus on their core work. What do they do?

Management 85

Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

But then the Lean Startup’s scientific method of validating their business idea quickly has them feeling right at home. In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. Sunny received his Ph.D. He received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 190

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 190

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

Transcript Automated transcription services provided by: Dan Bowen: My name is Dan Bowen, and I’m up in the wine country in Healdsburg, California north of San Francisco, and the company name is SyncBloc, S-Y-N-C-B-L-O-C. That cost structure for traditional industry, for historic reason, remains high. Jason: SyncBloc.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.) Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. This means they could fund other non-military academic programs from this overhead.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Waiting for images to move around the screen were not only driving them crazy, but costing them money.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 13, 2011

We write often of low-cost, high impact marketing tactics for small businesses and share tips for leveraging these. Search engine marketing is a tactic that is perfect for a lean, iterative approach to marketing. Related posts: Lean Marketing: Public Relations strategies for small businesses and startups.

Advertising 103

Advertising Lean Marketing Campaign 103

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

I recruited a top-flight engineer and serial entrepreneur to build our MVP, on equity?—?and As a boot-strapped founder aka our biggest investor, one of the things I leaned into uncovering was the unknown. Lean into it. and every other team member the same way. What did our customers think? Step on the scale. Of course I do.

Silicon Valley 54

Silicon Valley Startup B2C Sweat Equity 54

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2017

We combined the Lean Startup methodology – used by the National Science Foundation to commercialize science – with the rapid problem sourcing and solution methodology Pete developed on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq when he ran the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force. The Congressman From Science and Innovation.

Washington 206

Washington Security Afghanistan Iraq 206

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Beyond just those who will be hearing about the lean startup for the first time, Im expecting to shake a lot of hands and have a lot of interesting side conversations. Truth be told, we've got defense contractors here just like California does too. September 8, 2009 6:25 PM dbsaid. September 9, 2009 12:36 AM Richard Tibbetts said.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

But then the Lean Startup’s scientific method of validating their business idea quickly has them feeling right at home. In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. Sunny received his Ph.D. He received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Davis , a German applied Laser research group, a California organic farm er who wanted to be an Earlyvangelist , four service partners and three weed/pest management consultants. Our lecture covered Key Resources and Cost Structure.

South Dakota 217

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 217

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. On the way to the WorldAg Expo their Carrotbot (their research platform they built to gather data for machine vision/machine learning) hit the farm fields near Avenal , California. What’s the cost of the partnership?

Revenue 213

Revenue West Virginia Oklahoma Oklahoma City 213

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 120

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. Combined with product costs, an engineering budget, and schedules, this results in a spreadsheet that faintly resembles the first financial plan in the company’s business plan.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2020

The human toll a virus could inflict and the immense economic cost of the emergency response stayed with him. As a child living in Hong Kong through SARS, he saw first hand the human toll a virus could inflict, and the immense economic cost of the emergency response. We are in Santa Clara, California, still holding up well.

Artificial Inteligence 60

Artificial Inteligence Open Source Cofounder Design 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2020

And half our clubs were in the state of California in 2008, so was a very interesting time to be a CEO and learned a lot. And the truth is that's yesterday and you don't really have the ability to change what you did yesterday, but what you do have the ability today, is to lean into this. You're usually your own worst critic.

Technical Review 148

Technical Review Balance Sheet Texas Austin 148

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

October 2012 – Erin Turner and Gagan Biyani host the first Growth Hackers Conference in Menlo Park, California. June 2014 – Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown write Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth , which defines growth strategies as growth engines.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Part 3- Lean Cust. Firebase : Are all your developers front-end engineers? Google Custom Search Engine. Google App Engine. Steve Blank’s Lean Startup Resources. Lean Startup Circle â?? Search Engine Optimization Tools.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53