Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more. I couldn’t care less about those.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh). I mean, have you seen other people? Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

The Next Web

MARCH 11, 2014

Then Ben [one of the mobile engineers on the team] suggested a concept around sticking pieces of media to friends and people in the real world. For the past year, they invested in the team and technology to prioritize speed of iteration with disregard to traditional methods of customer development and company building.

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley Cofounder Stock Options Mobile 151

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Hence, cutting corners often paid huge dividends.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency. These metrics make it difficult for a company that wants to invest in long-term innovation. On the low-end, they undercut cost structures, resulting in customer migration.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Convertible debt financings have become an increasingly attractive approach for seed rounds because it delays the valuation discussion, costs less from a legal standpoint, and is an easier financial instrument to “keep raising more small amounts of money” on. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.)

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” 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.

Customer Development 280

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. ——————– Engineering 245.

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market. Agile software development. Customer development. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship , an introduction to building a scalable startup. This includes how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. Customer Discovery. Building Startup Teams.

Intellectual Property 234

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 234

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. In a startup context, numbers like gross revenue are actually vanity metrics, not actionable metrics. Luckily, we also discovered that certain other metrics, like LTV and CPA were much better than we initially projected. But $10.00?

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

In practice, how developers respond to this dilemma is determined by their incentives, which are driven by the culture of their team. Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? Continuous deployment is another such technique, one with a unique power to change development team dynamics for the better. Why does it work?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them. Automated testing dramatically reduces the cost of certifying changes, because it removes all of the grunt work QA traditionally does in software. Do new candidates write code during their interview?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries. Cost Structure is changed to Mission Cost/Budget. Customer Relationships is changed to Buy-in/Support. Changed Customer Segments to Beneficiaries.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Steve Blank

MARCH 1, 2010

In most startups the competitive analysis feature comparison ends up morphing into the Marketing Requirements Document that gets handed to engineering. Get to work and add all of these for first customer ship.”. Product development salutes and gets to work building the product. Competitive Analysis Drives Feature Sprawl.

Customer Development 260

Customer Development Metrics Differentiation Engineer 260

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Last fall, I began teaching the Lean LaunchPad course at Princeton ( EGR 495: Special Topics in Entrepreneurship ) with four teams of undergraduates (ok, there were a few engineering grad students in the mix), a brave first-time LLP co-teacher (Cal Simmons), and a talented and dedicated teaching assistant (Ismaiel Yakub). Beertending.

Lean 284

Lean Cofounder Dividend Business Model 284

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly. Related articles.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Although there is cost and overhead associated with continuous deployment, the benefits are immense. Nothing is more demoralizing to an engineering team. leanstartup bmorrow : Not just for engineers: ask why 5x every time something unexpected happens. Use some customer development to find out.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

Each part of the program is organized around one phase of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and begins with a keynote address from a heavy hitter: Steve Blank on Customer Development, Randy Komisar on "Getting to Plan B" and - a third person, not-yet-announced-but-extremely-cool-trust-me. I think this is a fair question.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. Despite all the energy invested in talking to authors about the size of their platform, very few gatekeepers have a rigorous set of metrics for measuring it. I’ve met a lot of gatekeepers in the past few months.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Plus, we saw some of the intrinsic limitations of supporting such a large staff: slower cycle times, higher cost basis, and - most importantly - the ability to serve only a limited number of customer segments. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60