Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last few years, there really hasn’t been a demand to innovate on top of the ecosystem that’s been built. And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. Christensen explained it wasn’t that existing companies didn’t see the new technologies/ products/ markets.

Lean 431

Lean Business Model Government Agile 431

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise.” ” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. 5) Funding.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering).

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2020

Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. We just held our third session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War.

Technology 423

Technology Afghanistan Iraq Vietnam 423

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Marketing , Teaching.

PR 319

PR China Lean Channel 319

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

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. Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.).

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. These founders specify, design, and build a fully featured product using classic product development methods without ever leaving their building. Focusing on the launch date.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Marketing , Teaching.

PR 211

PR China Lean Channel 211

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. For customer development, start with Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. As in many scalability decisions, we’d have been much better off investing in agility, so that we could change the architecture in response to actual customer demand, rather than trying to predict the future.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce. Google Ventures (GV). 17% (13 / 80).

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. What is customer development?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. Why does it work?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

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.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. For example, our goal could be: Create demand for our products and drive it into our sales channel. Create awareness of our company and brand for potential customers. with a strategy. they’ll win.).

Marketing 316

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 316

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. In order to use data effectively, we have to find ways to overcome this blindness.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Each new segment you attempt to serve can increase scope , adding to your workload and demanding more of your limited resources.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

I would have continued to scrape by with a product that was conceptually on point, but didn’t have the bells and whistles that customers expect nowadays. What I worry about is the demand on every one of your potential customer’s attention and time. Competition is everywhere. Something has to give.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Like Matthew, Jason sees enormous value in talking with customers: The biggest thing I learned was just how much you don’t know. Get out of the building.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Colorado Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Advertising 60

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. . November 19, 2008 5:57 PM McElroy Flavelle said. November 24, 2008 2:44 PM Eric said.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. is just another engineering process, not building a business.

Lean 285

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 285

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

For example, should we invest a week of engineering time into making our website more failure-proof (which were pretty sure will pay off right away) or into experimenting with a new technology (that might pay off in months, years, or never)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. What is customer development? Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

So in 2011, with support from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center in the Stanford Engineering School), we created a new capstone entrepreneurship class – the Lean LaunchPad. This type of teaching firepower and headcount was necessary as the teaching team expanded the class size to meet student demand.

Lean 254

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 254

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I’m taking a 52 week course in how to start up, run, operate, and achieve self employment. Sorry, folks.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

We were going to do that by turning marketing into a machine to generate end user demand, drive the that demand into our sales channels, and educate our sales channels. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

Silicon Valley 132

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 132

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

In the world of startups, this is like trying to sell a product to a very demanding customer who needs to see a lot of features before buying. Twenty years from now, operating systems might also work as a good metaphor. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89