Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The greatest risk in startups —and hence the greatest cause of failure—is not the technology risk of developing a product but in the risk of developing customers and markets.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. We’ll teach over 175 NSF Innovation Corps teams in the Lean LaunchPad course in 2012. Team EngineKites.

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Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

In my last post I described my approach to one of the three classes I teach at Stanford in the engineering school: Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship. A partner allows me the flexibility to miss a session or two (my job as a California Coastal Commissioner meets three days every month up and down the coast of California.)

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 226

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

Estimates show that only about 14% of engineers in 2012 were women (Crawford) and that number hasn’t gone up far in recent years. Women such as Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace have been an essential part of Computer Science and Engineering (Gürer, 2). Since February 2017, the percentage of Women in tech positions at Uber has gone up .3%

Silicon Valley 48

Silicon Valley Engineer Viral California 48

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Markets with Invention Risk are those where it’s questionable whether the technology can ever be made to work – but if it does customers will beat a path to the company’s door. are much more differentiating than technology. Technology can often be dealt with through a press release (at least perception).

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. None of this was an accident. It was all part of a strategy.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

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

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. He was the CEO of two startups.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

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. But he didn’t grow up with technology. And he gave them all early access to our prototypes for reaction.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. No kidding.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Startups in Bend.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Product management is very much the dream occupation of the liberal arts college student (such as I was) who aspires to an impactful career in business and technology rather than academia. A PM basically sits at the center of UX, technology and business. You may have heard the quote: ‘The PM is the CEO of their product.’

Management 85

Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. I found that having a senior marketer responsible for business strategy surrounded by ex-engineers and domain experts makes one heck of a powerful marketing department.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 329

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 329

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Other universities doing classified ELINT and Electronic Warfare work attended including University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology and Cornell. Unless you had the proper clearances you couldn’t read them.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

We as researchers go in with a bias – that obviously these guys want our technology – but that is not the case for a lot of customers. What you think about your technology is great, but at the end of the day you’re not the one buying it. In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering.

Cofounder 190

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 190

VC Cafe

DECEMBER 1, 2015

So-called after the California Gold Rush where the purveyors of picks and shovels made a killing (whereas the outcome for prospectors was mixed), the picks and shovels of machine intelligence are hardware, data feeds, and (arguably) the algorithms themselves. What might these technologies do? It’s not uncharted territory?—?if

Artificial Inteligence 60

Artificial Inteligence Algorithm Software Review Startup 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

We as researchers go in with a bias – that obviously these guys want our technology – but that is not the case for a lot of customers. What you think about your technology is great, but at the end of the day you’re not the one buying it. In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 5, 2022

And the technology we developed in the early two thousands and onward was blood draws and, you know, not really ready for prime time in the business setting. So now being able to get that data, the electrical signals associated with that from things like a smart watch, now you have a scalable and usable technology outside the lab.

Framework 78

Framework Technical Review Software Review Naming 78

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

So I was astonished how ready and eager students were for a class that combines the toughest problems in national security, with learning Lean Innovation methods. We had more applicants (70+) for the 32 seats in this class than we usually get in our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 128

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 22, 2020

Deputy Chief Technology Officers Cori Zarek and Ryan Panchadsaram to help all levels of government with COVID-19 response and delivery of services. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2013–2014, where she founded the United States Digital Service. She served as the U.S.

New Jersey 60

New Jersey Government CTO America 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

So I was astonished how ready and eager students were for a class that combines the toughest problems in national security, with learning Lean Innovation methods. We had more applicants (70+) for the 32 seats in this class than we usually get in our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 120

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2015

Errol Arkilic was the lead program director for the National Science Foundation I-Corps , which uses my Lean LaunchPad curriculum to teach scientists and engineers how to take their technology out of the lab and into the marketplace. The Lean LaunchPad class. That’s what scientists and engineers needed to embrace.

Government 120

Government Channel Southern California Lean 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

BMNT , a new Silicon Valley company, is combining the Lean Methods it learned in combat with the technology expertise and speed of startups. The University of California managed research and development of the bomb design at Los Alamos while the US Army managed the Los Alamos facilities and the overall administration of the project.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Afghanistan Iraq Kuwait 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2020

We are in Santa Clara, California, still holding up well. We have the machine learning technology to take these disparate, small pieces of molecules, and stitch them together to form an actual anti-COVID drug." Eric Ries : Then somehow you made the transition from the scientist in a lab to the founder of a technology start up.

Artificial Inteligence 60

Artificial Inteligence Open Source Cofounder Design 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 120

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2016

The cross-disciplinary class brings students from widely divergent backgrounds together in teams of three to five, each aiming to tackle a gnarly international problem vexing Foggy Bottom in just 10 weeks by applying Lean LaunchPad methodology. The time difference between Washington and California often doesn’t help.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. Competing To Win Deals - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 7, 2010 The venture capital business is highly competitive. This post is an accusation.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2020

Jake Soberal and Irma Olguin started Bitwise in 2013 with the idea that the technology industry could be used to fix a city--in their case, Fresno, CA. Our fundamental thesis is that people of color, women, communities of concentrated poverty, have immense talent to contribute to the technology industry," Jake explained to me. "In

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Fresno Community Technology California 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What plan says that?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215