Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. The rest is worth reading as well. You’re not joining a big company. steve Am I a Founder?

Cofounder 229

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

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 126

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

Video 180

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 140

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In the Fall of 2008, the credit crisis wiped out mergers and acquisitions as a path to liquidity as M&A collapsed with the rest of the market. The formula for exits was a variation of the formula they used in the Internet bubble, morphing into: brand, hype and sell the company. So what’s left?

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 233

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 206

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 206

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Government Regulations I turned to the class and said, “The rest of you can keep building your company and shipping your product because you don’t need to worry about government regulations.

Vertical 154

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 154

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. Reply Dave Goulden , on March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm Said: I love the redefinition of the market.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 153

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We We need your decision now because we are about to spend $50,000 on new collateral.”

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. 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. And the rest is history.

Silicon Valley 190

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 190

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. Everything else flows from that.

Entrepreneur 290

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 290

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. Alex, vice provost for Innovation & Economic Development at Weber State University in Utah and completing his first year of teaching entrepreneurship.

Silicon Valley 310

Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 310

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

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. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. BUT, they moved into a nice office off of Sand Hill Road.

Silicon Valley 226

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 226

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant. And even if you did it’s the wrong focus, and time spent for a startup 2. If winning $5-10K is your goal, you’re not a scalable startup, just a small business.

Business Plan 152

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 152

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole Customer Development processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. Many people at a young startup are trying to manage their finances like the rest of their user base.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « The Curse of a New Building Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 » 33 Responses William , on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 am Said: Heh.

Founder 308

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 308

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 20, 2014

The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customer development and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) But what NYU did with the rest of their grant dollars was simply brilliant. Make it Better. So Frank did.

Lean 273

Lean New York City New York Customer Development 273

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

We trying to teach students a methodology that combines customer development, agile development, business models and pivots. Only in California! This team spoke face-to-face with 50+ end users, 3 manufacturers, 25 potential partners, 22 domain experts and surveyed an additional 115 customers. And do it in 8 weeks.

Lean 260

Lean Business Model Agile United States 260

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2016

Jim lectures at University of California Santa Barbara and elsewhere on the process of discovering successful business models. We didn’t understand what would work in the rest of the world. . Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Sweden 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. You just get successful. This was basically my m.o. in school. They do great stuff.

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. At the end of a run I used to lay out and relax on the rocks to rest – at least I did, until the guards asked if I knew that there were more poisonous things per square foot here than anywhere in the world.) It shunned publicity.

Silicon Valley 276

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 276

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image.

Silicon Valley 135

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 135

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 175

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

Silicon Valley 199

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 199

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. No one was confused after that. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 130

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 130

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

Silicon Valley 264

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 264

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. 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. It was so out of character, people were shocked. True? .&#

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

Silicon Valley 219

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 219

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

These were: setting the grand challenge; installing the systems and culture that enable people, even junior people, to be able to run fast experiments to achieve that challenge; pulling insights from those experiments, no matter whether they succeeded or failed; and living by the same rules and the same discipline as the rest of the team.

Lean 166

Lean Leadership California Retention 166

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

She took a break from Stanford in 1990 and 1991, as VP of business development at Protein Design Labs , Inc. Prior to that, she spent 12 years at Stanford; worked at Monsanto and Sigma Chemical as a research scientist; administered a dialysis clinical trial at University of California; and taught chemistry and basic engineering courses.

Government 120

Government Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Silicon Valley 120

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

Is this feature usable, and is the UX reasonably consistent with the rest of my product? It doesn’t fit in with the rest of your offering. You must be prepared to kill features , and it’s always easiest to kill a feature in the earliest stages before it develops a small but vocal group of devoted users.

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Advisory Board 40

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. However, the mistake would be to confuse the interest in consumer facing companies with mass interest in the rest of corporate America. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. It may happen, but its not there yet. (As

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 143

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Never miss an event.

Entrepreneur 333

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 333

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

When doing the post-interview team meeting, it was common for the first opinion expressed about a candidate to become the prevailing opinion of the rest of the team members. It ended with a large layoff and a transfer of jobs from NY to California and Bangalore. The two rounds of questioning is a good idea for avoiding that.

San Francisco 83

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 83

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area’s electronics industry began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas. What is customer development? Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68