Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Reply Lots of low cost experiments « Open Ambition , on April 22, 2009 at 8:58 am Said: [.] Reply Killing Innovation with Corner Cases and Consensus « Steve Blank , on April 22, 2009 at 5:04 am Said: [.] “Speed and Tempo&# – Fearless Decision Making for Startups [.]

Silicon Valley 300

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

The Startup Death Spiral: The Cost of Getting Product Launch Wrong By the time of first customer ship, if a startup does not understand its market and customers, failure unfolds in a stylized ritual, almost like a Japanese Noh play.

Customer Development 224

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Therefore, no, we weren’t really equipped to be the low cost provider. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? No, not really. And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 141

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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. This was just before the IBM PC hit the desktop so there were no “standard” operating systems or applications for desktop platforms.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Your best bet is probably taking an existing market and serving a portion of it better than the competition, through lower cost or a different set of features. Don’t spend time and money on getting the word out about your product beyond what you need to do discovery and validation. End of theory.&#

Customer Development 219

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

customers aren’t buying it, the cost of distribution is too high, etc.) Not testing these hypotheses upfront is a fundamental and, in many cases, fatal error most startups make. Because it isn’t until after first customer ship that a startup discovers that their initial hypotheses were simply wrong (i.e.

Customer Development 238

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. That kind of accountable.

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. 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.

Video 164

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

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. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab.

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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. Be respectful, honest and transparent with people as you never know how much time, effort and energy it cost them to get where they are.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.) This means they could fund other non-military academic programs from this overhead. The Stanford Applied Electronics Lab built prototypes which were handed off to the military labs for their evaluation.

Silicon Valley 142

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. We needed a way to shut down the German Air Defense system.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent.

North Carolina 143

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 181

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 149

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget.

Silicon Valley 178

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.) This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Who recommends a sale?

Lean 244

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 156

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

Customer Development 242

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

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. With that information in hand, Engineering estimates delivery dates and development costs. These markets live entirely in decreasing returns economics.

Silicon Valley 260

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

On first glance it appears as if they are spending to much energy in the vertical portion of the jump, relative to the horizontal portion. Stotting consists of fleeing via a jumping behavior that appears to be sub-optimal. Look at the drug warriors and the drug cartels. Eventually that whole struggle will have to go the way of prohibition.

Silicon Valley 247

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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

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

steve Jay Levitt , on September 11, 2009 at 5:39 pm Said: There’s a fun corollary to this: If you’re creating a new market, you WANT competitors, because they’ll share the cost of educating your target market. If you’re lucky, you can ride in their slipstream and let them do all the work.

Customer Development 196

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

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

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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.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 26, 2019

California retains its rank as one of the most desirable states to live in, despite untenable property prices, high taxes, and a cornucopia of social issues. California homeowners are selling up and moving East, to neighboring states. California’s loss is Nevada and Arizona’s gain. In San Francisco, that figure is $1.4

San Francisco 113

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Thanks for sharing the lessons you’ve learned, especially the ones where the cost is measured in years. If you are entrepreneur with a solid business that actually makes money you would know that VC has the highest cost of capital imaginable and would find better options.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. There are serious negative trade-off costs with using reflex designs but compared to the economic costs of each vacuum tube, it was a justified trade-off.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Waiting for images to move around the screen were not only driving them crazy, but costing them money. The good news was that the Spif strategy was working; the bad news is that it was costing the company our entire profit. And by more than anything, I mean that the word performance came up time and again from these professionals.

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

We can put both little- and big-endian in the chip, and it won’t cost us more than 1,000 gates.” I ran back to the company and said customers had told us, “We have to do both little and big endian.” The reaction from the chip circuit design guys was, “OK, we could do that. The reaction from our software guys was a little less kind. “Are

Customer Development 278

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

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. Essentially, we decided that here’s this stuff that we’re going to do (which is mobility and delivery) through partnerships that would allow us to lower our cost base pretty significantly.

Iran 39

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Are his costs in control? It’s a company that’s lost sight of the values that got it there. Don’t let it happen to you. Stay hungry, stay lean. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. Is the story over? The same principles operate in living as in business.

Silicon Valley 205

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager. the manager followed us still yelling.

Founder 297

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Reed Hastings of Netflix has said, “It’s not a strategy if failing in it doesn’t actually cost you something real.” Pivots can be high-cost, but they can also be high-reward. The average customer acquisition cost of advertising on Yahoo or Netscape was well over $40. HOW DO I KNOW WHEN IT’S TIME TO PIVOT?

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