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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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

Acelerar Technologies Daniel expects SharePoint's cloud based solution provider eco-system to develop over the next few years. Anupam Rajey from Lucknow, India, presented Acelerar Technologies , an outsourced accounting services BPO project from India. For now, it won't come in through the store. He currently has a 1999 strategy.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.) I looked around the room thinking I’d see the faces of the engineers in the ESL M-4 vault, but these were different people. VP of Sales? Wait a minute. where am I? Who were these people?

Silicon Valley 175

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The Startup Magazine

APRIL 9, 2020

California has been a national leader in codes that protect building occupants from seismic events, but there is a great deal of work remaining to be done. Pedram Zohrevand , an engineering consultant, explains the ways in which builders and property owners can increase their structures’ earthquake safety.

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ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

Today James Hickey from San Diego, California, pitched Parallel6 , a company that does social media marketing services for brands and also has a white label mobile app that can be customized and branded for their clients' mobile and social marketing needs. In that case, the verticals of choice could be manufacturing, wholesale and retail.

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

What appears clear to me today is how fundamentally the Internet is changing business processes, and the advent of nifty social media tools and technologies that plug into core business processes like lead nurturing are a powerful force. The next event will be on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 8:00 AM (PDT), register to attend here.

Entrepreneur 116

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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 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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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. 2-way search is still in the works but I have the semantic extracted tags (thanks to Zemanta) feeding in to many search engines (activate realtime frankensearch). I was an idiot. What type of feedback do you think I should go after?Obviously

Silicon Valley 179

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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

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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.

Video 164

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) I was living the dream – working 80 hour weeks and all the technology I could drink with a fire hose.)

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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 271

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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 278

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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. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. But I was breathing heavy and it felt like I was looking at supercomputer porn.

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team. The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes.

Venture Capital 209

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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. Technology? For example, How does sales differ from one market to another? Where do the ideas come from?

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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.)

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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.

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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.

Silicon Valley 124

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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.

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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

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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. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

Silicon Valley 120

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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. As part of the sales organization, I thought I kind of figured out what the function of the sales department was. (In In reality it would be another 20 years.)

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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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

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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 184

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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.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2019

UbiQD enabled this innovation with safer, cheaper, and more reliable quantum dot technology that it’s licensing from M.I.T., Therefore, we can create almost any arbitrary glow spectrum, for example, to mimic the late summer sun in a specific location like Northern California. It works on cannabis too! Plants love it. Great question.

Technical Review 54

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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. The obvious one’s were who were they? What did they do that they needed an expensive color graphics card?

Silicon Valley 185

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Reid Hoffman

JULY 13, 2021

It starts before the technology development even gets underway, says Stanford University computer science professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li , who is the co-founder and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For example, technology and ethics has quickly become one of the most popular undergraduate and graduate-level classes.

Technical Review 36

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence America Algorithm 36

Reid Hoffman

JULY 13, 2021

It starts before the technology development even gets underway, says Stanford University computer science professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li , who is the co-founder and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For example, technology and ethics has quickly become one of the most popular undergraduate and graduate-level classes.

Technical Review 36

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence America Algorithm 36

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 172

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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 136

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. The plan calls for selling in volume the day Engineering is finished building the product. While the product is being engineered, Marketing begins to create web sites, corporate presentations and sales materials.

Customer Development 215

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Austin Startup

JANUARY 10, 2019

5G is the latest iteration of cellular technology, engineered to exponentially increase the speed (up to 100 times current levels ) and responsiveness of wireless networks. Global technology analyst and advisory firm Moor Insights & Strategy estimates the infrastructure spending on 5G will exceed $326 billion by 2025.

San Francisco 58

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

But what I remind them is that great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.) There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. I love Google.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Stanford and MIT were building on the technology breakthroughs of World War II and graduating a generation of engineers into a consumer and cold war economy that seemed limitless. Communication between scientists, engineers and corporations were relatively open, and ideas flowed freely. There was none.

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