Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. But part of his life that that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry is that Bill Perry used Silicon Valley to help end the cold war.

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The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. Hire versatile players and lean into your team The SVB collapse reminded us that staffing matters.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. I’ve tried to read a lot of your History of Silicon Valley posts. Find out Memorex’s position in Silicon Valley. They are very interesting. Now In Print!

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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.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Therefore, no, we weren’t really equipped to be the low cost provider. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? No, not really. And we lost money when we did so.

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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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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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 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. That kind of accountable. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. But to get video to fit and playback on the computers of the era, they needed to compress it. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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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. What’s the customer acquisition cost?

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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. Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. 12comments: Dougvs said.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. 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. Ortho kills.

Silicon Valley 269

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

So I gave my “ The Secret History of Silicon Valley ” talk as the keynote to the CIA’s venture capital conference. So this post is how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley&#. (I’ll And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.”

Silicon Valley 267

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe 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. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.) This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes. This is basic enough that I don’t think anyone can argue with it – reduce the cost of mistakes. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

Venture Capital 239

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

However, I’ve seen this story repeated time and again, and not just in Silicon Valley. Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry.

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. Growth hacking is a term that emerged from the Silicon Valley tech community and the lean startup methodology. One of Qless’s core verticals is the retail industry. How can you reduce the cost of testing and optimization?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

We can put both little- and big-endian in the chip, and it won’t cost us more than 1,000 gates.” Reply My take on Customer Development and the Lean Startup | Recess Mobile Blog , on January 9, 2010 at 5:29 am Said: [.] Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Are you out of your !? *x! Then WHAT it IS?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Waiting for images to move around the screen were not only driving them crazy, but costing them money. The good news was that the Spif strategy was working; the bad news is that it was costing the company our entire profit. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# of total entrepreneurs born in China and India is not even close to what entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley looks like. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. In the country of birth it says 0.6%

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

These poor miserable people who insist in making money at the cost of others, deserve our compassion, not emulation The real success I believe is leading a happy life and to hopefully provide for your worldly needs and those of your dependents. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” Not enough people understand the emotional cost of being a start-up founder. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Reply Michael F.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. So the norms that we have were a combination of bottoms-up and then some top-down leaning. Because that’s something that we all in Silicon Valley [need to do].

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

This is the first of two posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– Building Blocks of Entrepreneurship By the mid 1950’s the groundwork for a culture and environment of entrepreneurship were taking shape on the east and west coasts of the United States.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Our calculations had us losing money on the two lowest cost boards, breaking even on the third and making great margins on the other six. As customers saw them, they were a new family of products aimed directly at the color desktop publishing market with astonishing performance and a low-cost entry price. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

In hindsight this list looks pretty organized but in reality we made it up as we went along, accompanied with all the husband and wife struggles of being married and trying to raise a family in Silicon Valley. Most Silicon Valley startups have great policies for having your dog at work but not your kids.) Long vacations.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

If a company behaves this way you avoid optimizing a single component at the cost of the entire system. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Reply alancommike , on May 4, 2009 at 9:24 am Said: This is so true, i’ve seen it time and again. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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