Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. I would learn a ton from Gordon for over a decade, not only about practical heuristics for managing complex engineering projects (i.e. The response from across the country? Glad you two called, we were trying to get a hold of you guys. We’re building a supercomputer.”

North Carolina 125

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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.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Too often, CEOs and small business managers suffer from analysis paralysis. It looks as though you and I have the same taste in layout, no? I’ve written about this subject many times and could not agree more. This happens for any number of reasons. Some are afraid of making the wrong decision.

Silicon Valley 300

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Every startup has some methodology for product development, launch and life-cycle management. Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. In this post I’m going to describe the flaws of the product development model. It’s a big idea.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks. What did I learn so far?

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Let’s Fire Our Customers « Steve Blank (tags: product-management startup business) [.] 3) Managing the relationship is more consumptive than the rewards. I’ll add I’m particularly curious about how founders recognize that point at which they need to exit / fire the old customers.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

APRIL 21, 2011

Their goal is to deploy CarrotBot this week in the farm fields in Avenal, California, on the way to the World Ag Expo. PersonalLibraries was focused on creating a reference management system for discovering, organizing and citing researchers’ readings. Should they look at the Document Management market?

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Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker. When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley.

Lean 221

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 221

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. My last session was with a passionate, smart, entrepreneurial team from a Fortune 100 company. Lessons Learned.

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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. In 1964, Bill Perry, the head of the lab, frustrated with GTE’s management, quit (GTE, a phone company had bought Sylvania in 1959.)

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. And he offered the following insight into the VC- founder relationship: Evangelos : As you understand product-market fit, this is where finessing and reworking of the management team, is very important. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. Then it hit me – no one else wanted to be manager – what was the worst that could happen? What’s the Worst that Can Happen? All I had to do was ask.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Reply Eran Shir , on November 21, 2009 at 9:35 pm Said: Steve, a great post is judged by the level of discussion it manages to spur, so in that metric, this is a fantastic one. I don’t think you need operational experience to be a good VC but Mark Suster’s great new post illustrates the difference. [.]

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject. It was a management problem. We had been outsourcing an important part of our demand creation strategy – packaging – to an outside agency without having the expertise to judge or manage the results.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the rest of the management team really skeptical. When we saw our salespeople actually trying to steal the early boards to take home and show their kids, we knew we had a winner. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else. Little did we know.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions. This happens because managing the present often takes oxygen away from inventing the future. Alexander and I often collaborate on new ideas for corporate innovation. Equip this “space” with power and prestige.

Non-Compete 329

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 329

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

They built airplanes out of palm trees thinking if they did manna would come in airplanes again.

Silicon Valley 217

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

And that most of the post on trade shows was describing how to prepare and manage a physical presence in a trade show booth. Reply steveblank , on May 22, 2009 at 2:39 pm Said: Morteza, The comments about “ignore this post&# were meant that if your sales channel is the web you rarely go to trade shows.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2015

My guests this past week on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Pete Newell , managing partner of BMNT Partners. Matt Weingart, program development manager in the Strategic Development Office at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Listen to my entire chat with John.

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Channel Japan Bosnia Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. He’s a co-founder and CEO of HB Risk , and a Professor and Department Chair in Civil Engineering at California State University, Chico. Sunny Shah is an Assistant Director for the ESTEEM Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. Sunny received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 190

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 190

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. ———– The 99%. They accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009.

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) 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

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Before OpenGov, he built California Common Sense , the open data and government watchdog non-profit. Ajeet learned the ropes of enterprise startups at Aster Data Systems , where he was Senior Director of Product Management. Dakin was recognized as one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016. .

Cofounder 274

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Before OpenGov, he built California Common Sense , the open data and government watchdog non-profit. Ajeet learned the ropes of enterprise startups at Aster Data Systems , where he was Senior Director of Product Management. Dakin was recognized as one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016. .

Cofounder 274

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 274

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines.

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions. This happens because managing the present often takes oxygen away from inventing the future. Alexander and I often collaborate on new ideas for corporate innovation. Equip this “space” with power and prestige.

Non-Compete 120

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

– Cornell University; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University; and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego. As one could imagine this was the last thing the supercomputer center management wanted to hear.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 185

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

weeks ago, positioning it as a tool designed to help small businesses effectively manage their social media efforts. The problem is that our messaging on the home page shouts “Write Once, Publish Everywhere&#.

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 170

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2011

The first team up was PersonalLibraries the team making a reference management system for discovering, organizing and citing researchers’ readings. On the way to the WorldAg Expo their Carrotbot (their research platform they built to gather data for machine vision/machine learning) hit the farm fields near Avenal , California.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan. I still think it is, but orthodox managers don’t see it that way. The irony is that few startups fit these criteria. None of mine did.) Ortho kills.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Reply Best books for the lean product managers — Justin Gibbs , on April 28, 2009 at 2:44 pm Said: [.] That’s in stark contrast to the traditional Product Development Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of [.] familiar with Customer Development you should be.

Product Development 143

Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 143

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. He’s a co-founder and CEO of HB Risk , and a Professor and Department Chair in Civil Engineering at California State University, Chico. Sunny Shah is an Assistant Director for the ESTEEM Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. Sunny received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 127

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Since the Customer Development model assumes that most startups cycle through these first two steps at least twice, it allows a well-managed company to carefully estimate and frugally husband its cash. Having raised lots of money tempts you to give products away, steeply discount to buy early business, etc., It rarely happens that way.)

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242