Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. No one will say work less and go home and spend time with your partner and/or family. Reply 7thpixel , on June 29, 2009 at 10:23 am Said: My first start up in 1999 I was employee #10 or so and signed up for a Graphic Designer position.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The responsibility for validating the founders original hypotheses is delegated to employees – the sales and marketing team. Or at times an even more honest answer, “My senior partners say this is the only way to do it.” This means the founders are isolated from directly hearing customer input – good, bad and ugly.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

I was mortified with the dressing down in front of my friends as well as new employees I barely knew. Law firm partners often have anger management issues, but the thing about anger is that it is not always wrong to be angry — if somebody is angry at you because you did something wrong, then that anger is valid.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. And one would become my mentor and partner in later companies.) Two of my role models for my career were in this company. (And

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. The second was when a Southern Californian aircraft company decided to break into the missiles and space field by partnering with Stanford electronics expertise.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Meanwhile on the West Coast – “The Group” 1950’s When Ampex was raising its money, in 1952, an employee of Fireman’s Fund in San Francisco, Reid Dennis , managed to put $20,000 in the deal. In a typical venture fund, the partners receive a 2% management fee. This is where the partners would make their money.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. Hewlett’s partner Dave Packard wanted to get into the computer business.) I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) It was still a year away from its IPO.

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techcrunch.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Similarly, the bulk of the companies getting funding are still California-based. After Northern California and Southern California the biggest area of investment geographically was in international companies. The cost of money is steep, and only works in certain verticals, of which software is NOT one.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Blogs (VC): Antonio Rodriguez [link] – A very technical VC at Matrix partners who can actually code. Blogs (web development): Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots – [link] Company blog of thoughtbot covering Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases, and mobile development.

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

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. The pro tip is to go to the key one or two VCs and get them on board as your partner in the decision.

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