Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.). Fourth, as a public official in the State of California , to offer a window on how public policy on California Coastal protection gets made. To add your email to the free podcast alert service, click here.

Silicon Valley 195

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. His wife, about my age, could have been a poster child for the stereotypical California hippie surfer, with politics that matched her style – antiwar, anti government, antiestablishment.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. He even remembered the names of their wives and kids and some details about schools or events. (I I couldn’t believe it, here we were wasting precious time and the dumb sales guy is talking about other stuff.)

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Crammed into Silicon Valley along with millions of people around the San Francisco Bay it’s hard to fathom that 15 air miles away was a stretch of California coast that was still rural. How did I miss that?

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn.

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Your response and version #3 begs another question, namely: was everyone treated this way or just you? However the U.S. Thanks for both.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

We have in our partnership a gent by the name of Barry Fidelman who puts us all to shame with his intensity. Many VC’s I know are simply not that hungry, they are the ones you should worry about most. You need relentless intent, focus, the willingness to challenge, the willingness to take measured risk.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Please contact me with your email address. But you probably never heard of ReelTime. Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe. Great blog, just now found it.

Video 164

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. All with names, addresses, phone numbers, job titles; all wonderful data longing for human contact. This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers.

Silicon Valley 185

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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. Their code name was UTR (Up The River) in reference to their geographic location up the Potomac River.

Silicon Valley 171

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.),

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. That meant that our boards were packaged in boxes sold to retailers and were displayed on shelves in their computer stores.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. Spooky Music Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career. Play spooky music here.

Silicon Valley 180

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Poplytics – online surveys and analytics AskYourTargetMarket – market research surveys SurveyMonkey - granddaddy of on-line surveys Amazon Mechanical Turk – you can set up a question and get answers PickFu – A/B testing $5 for 50 opinions Collaboration Dropbox – store, sync, and, share files online.

Software Review 110

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 128

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” Except at this VC conference, 100 or so of the 300 attendees had badges that had their first name and only the last initial of their last name. (And

Silicon Valley 247

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand.

Silicon Valley 176

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? Sure one guy got kicked out – which could have been avoided if he ran company well enough to keep financial control – and the other hung in there and got institutions named after him. Yet you never hear who built that company. Who was he?

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Did the company send out direct mail (email or postcards) to potential or pre-registered attendees reminding them to stop by the booth? Has the company talked to key industry analysts/press pre-show to ask them to stop by?

Silicon Valley 178

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.”

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

I just found out that someone stole my idea today and also is using my name with “The&# in front of it. Reply Gabriel Gunderson , on December 3, 2009 at 9:58 am Said: Eager to hear about the less benign time! Thanks for sharing. Reply Chris , on December 3, 2009 at 10:26 am Said: Thanks for sharing.

Silicon Valley 149

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals. As a going away gift my roommates got me a joke disguise kit with a fake nose, glasses and mustache. he asked me.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.)

Silicon Valley 139

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

How delightful it would be to have a presidential candidate named Frost. Groovelily Reply jorge , on November 28, 2009 at 12:15 pm Said: I made a similar decision when I left a defense contractor to “go to California&# and work at startups nearly 20 years ago. One must know one’s self and one must know the future.

Silicon Valley 121

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

As its name should communicate, the Customer Development model focuses on developing customers for the product or service your startup is building. These steps mesh seamlessly and support a startup’s ongoing product development activities. Each step results in specific deliverables.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. And brand-names are ultimately are just commodities that can be bought and sold (e.g., Agilent is a $5.8 billion dollar test and measurement company.

Silicon Valley 164

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

Perhaps you can determine whether a product is new by asking customers to name the competition. If they can’t name anything, you’ve got a new product that you can position in a new market (or in non-new market by comparing your product to substitutes (there are no direct competitors in this case)). It was a new product.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

The company has a large press event, and Marketing launches a series of programs to create end-user demand (trade shows, seminars, advertising, email, and so on). My pet name for the process is “Ortho.&# Sales is heavily building and staffing a national sales organization; the sales channel has quotas and sales goals.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Reply Greg Moreno , on August 7, 2009 at 8:26 pm Said: I came here looking for tips, ideas, and inspirations for entrepreneurs but now I am more interested in your war and spy stories Reply YA , on September 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm Said: Steve: you may wish to know that PVO Strany is not an official name, it is a journalistic term.

Silicon Valley 153

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Reply steveblank , on April 16, 2009 at 10:36 am Said: Jerry, As Domino’s and Amazon found out this week, social networks can quickly disseminate information faster than most traditional marketing organizations can react.

Silicon Valley 134

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

I’m sure its customers wonder, “Why is an organic grocer named RydeOn?”. 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. Not all pivots are created equal.

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Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

And these reports are so often clustered at the top with 152 variations of the brand names. Email marketing is another fav.) If you are looking for short-term revenue or quick wins, you are better off skipping it (do something boring, but profitable, like Email or Affiliate marketing). Geographic World Domination Opportunities.

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