Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos spent 20+ years in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering. You need to be able to understand how to take advantage of the market you’re operating in, including how to take advantage of corporations. .

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.)

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. Tim started to change our processes.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. We knew something our CEO didn’t.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you. Reply Ray Debs , on April 29, 2009 at 6:55 pm Said: Hi Steve, I am thoroughly enjoying reading your blog posts, and looking forward to more.

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 170

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 only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.” This is easy to test.

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? I still remember that I was gearing up to go into my ‘I’m going to blame the sales guy’ routine.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. Do the right thing.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. “And, oh by the way, can you write the manuals for the operators while you’re at it.&# As I poured over the system schematics, I figured out how to put together a course to teach system theory, operations and maintenance.

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. That’s when things went south.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. There are things you can get for sales force if you use salesforce.com. The fact that you didn’t even mention sales force is interesting.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. Similarly, government purchasing is a frustrating series of hoops, even compared to enterprise sales. There are and we do.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I lived through the time when working in my first job in Ann Arbor Michigan we had to get out a map to find out that San Jose was not only in Puerto Rico but there was a city with that same name in California. To continually innovate, companies need to operate at startup speed and cycle time much longer their 20 th century counterparts did.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

California Milk Processor Board) – 1993. You Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Talk To Your Own Customers - Austin Startup , July 12, 2010 Andy Meadows is the founder and CEO of Bearhug , an Austin-based customer engagement platform launching today. Customer Care Today. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. turn customer feedback into action. turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. customer feedback, vote, comment, manage. live customer chat. SaaS Sales Team Compensation â?? California Israel Chamber of Commerce. Customer Development.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53