Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 139

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 280

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Simulation to Reduce Invention Risk If you’re in a vertical where “invention risk” is dominant, then you want to do everything you can to manage and reduce those risks. When I wrote the Four Steps to the Epiphany , the Customer Development text, I hadn’t yet thought about what vertical markets it might be appropriate for.)

Vertical 130

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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 flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 BPM vendor (every software vendor!) release of the product.

Customer Development 241

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 241

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

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. I grabbed one of each piece of literature, stuffed into my bag, and wandered through the exhibit hall looking at other hardware and petroleum software companies.

Silicon Valley 151

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc.

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

techcrunch.com

AUGUST 12, 2012

She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. The top layer of applications and services that use the innovations of the first two layers to transform vertical markets (e.g, San Francisco, California.

Early Stage 70

Early Stage San Francisco Los Angeles Southern California 70

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 275

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 275

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S.

Agile 251

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. How could it go wrong? Little did I know. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours. This was upfront and center for anyone who walked into my office could see what I thought was important.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 212

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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

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. And since the card was useless without any application software, what other software products did they use on it?

Silicon Valley 192

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 192

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. Context here.) The company failed.

Silicon Valley 178

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Simulation applications After six months, we hypothesized that our most likely customers were scientists and engineers who used one of five applications: computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and seismic data processing and reservoir simulation. Their interest was easy to understand.

Silicon Valley 138

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 138

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Combined with product costs, an engineering budget, and schedules, this results in a spreadsheet that faintly resembles the first financial plan in the company’s business plan. Engineering focuses on building the product; it designs the product, specifies the first release and hires a staff to build the product.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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. And investors said they intend to invest more in cleantech than software going forward.

Venture Capital 62

Venture Capital Technical Review Sweat Equity Valuation 62

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. We were combining Stanford Engineering theory with ESL design engineers and implementing it with chips so new we were debugging the silicon as we were debugging the entire system. Taking concepts that had been only abstract Ph.D

Silicon Valley 273

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

For example, if you are selling enterprise software, getting 3-5 early customers may be enough in Customer Validation. Since “in a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions,&# the first software release is usually built on an unproven set of opinions, assumptions and [.]

Customer Development 246

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

They were national efforts of hundreds of companies employing 10’s or 100’s of thousands of engineers. military realized that our advantage over the Soviet Union was in silicon, software and systems. There was a ton of engineering innovation and coordination along the way, and the project could have failed at any point.

Silicon Valley 121

Silicon Valley RSS California Chad 121

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department. you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 185

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

For example, let’s say you’re an enterprise software company that delivers an on-premise product, but now wants to pivot to delivering a SaaS product in the cloud. This pivot fundamentally changes your required organizational competencies, from Sales and Marketing to Engineering, Operations, and Support.

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Out of Stanford Business School she went to work for Apple as an evangelist and then joined Ansa Software , the developer of Paradox, a Mac-database. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. My wife knew a bit about startups.

Entrepreneur 332

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 332

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

The post outlines eight sources vendors use to collect data: Toolbars, panels, ISP data, search engines, self reported, scraped/indexed, hybrid, and external voc. For just a few dollars a month get VPN software. One of the methods to capture CI data is to use intrusive monitoring software (Nielsen, ComScore, others use this strategy).

Metrics 60

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