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

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy takes the Lean Startup methodology and applies it to problems sourced from the State Department. Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy takes the Lean Startup methodology and applies it to problems sourced from the State Department. Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Go spend some time outside the building talking to potential distribution partners. Steve I have to tell you some bad news, I just showed our potential channel partners and customers a few completed pieces of the games we had. Founders need to validate their vision in front of customers early and often. Make sure they are.

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Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 207

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

The chart above shows age distribution within major social networks and online communities. Lean Business: Capacity Management, Overhead, and Your Business – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.). Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Clay : Yeah.

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Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 17, 2009 Join the Lean Startup discussion at Web 2.0 Expo for free Im honored to announce that my Lean Startup session at the Web 2.0 Everyone else can register to come to both sessions for free, including the Lean Startup talk in the main conference. What does this mean for you?

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Video 139

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

— Its been three and a half years since I first designed and taught the Lean LaunchPad class and lots of water has gone under the bridge since then. Like in all our Lean Launchpad classes we teach a combination of theory coupled with intense and immersive experiential learning outside the classroom. Massive pivot.

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Lean Silicon Valley Customer Development Incubator 272

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

At a university business plan competition, for the first time they can swim in the sea of expertise that we/I take for granted in the middle of Silicon Valley. I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) I was simply confused about what a plan was for.

Business Plan 140

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 140

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– The First Valley IPO’s Silicon Valley first caught the eyes of east coast investors in the late 1950’s when the valleys first three IPO’s happened: Varian in 1956, Hewlett Packard in 1957, and Ampex in 1958.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley SBIC San Francisco RSS 125

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Partnership Opportunities At any show you are attending there has to be tons of opportunity for business to business relationships you hadn’t thought about.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. What’s the distribution channel. How do we price and position the product?

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. 2001 – 2010: Back to Basics: The Lean Startup. Carpe Diem. We’re now in the second Internet bubble. Rules For the New Bubble: 2011 -2014.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Gridco Systems – Power Distribution Systems (backed by General Catalyst and Northbridge). Dan Allred – Silicon Valley Bank (@dgallred). Great for recent grads or career switchers.

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

Guest Post by Jennifer Maerz, Contributing Editor of Lean Startup Co., Here’s the thing about The Lean Startup methodology. Our customer-first, rapid trials-rapid discovery ethos is adaptable to all varieties of mission driven, enterprise, and startup companies around the world. At The Lean Startup Conference on Nov.

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Kenya Lean Community Africa 60

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development.

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 212

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

I responded to their RFP by proposing that Ardent build the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center a distributed supercomputing environment with hundreds of Ardent personal supercomputers rather than a monolithic Cray supercomputer. Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one.

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Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 185

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Looking to create their accelerator/incubator, Wayne and seven other founders rented a Silicon Valley house together one summer. The features didn’t match what ultimately the customers would buy or wanted.

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Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

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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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods. Introducing Lean Planning: How to Plan Less and Grow Faster. How to Write a Traditional Business Plan.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Do you know have they distribute their product? Do you know the archetype of their customers? This is easy to test.

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “ Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.”

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 149

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

His posts are born of tremendous research into the secret history of Silicon Valley , and if you haven’t read those essays, you should. For software companies especially, scaling distribution and development is comparatively cheap. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian. The old ways aren’t working.

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IPO San Francisco Lean Silicon Valley 166

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Prior to Sorced, Elizabeth worked in business development at SecondMarket. The Alchemist Series: Customer Development and Metrics. Santa Clara, CA.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. Note that they plan a trip to San Diego to visit the customer. With a great assist from the State Departments innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.) Slide 2, John Boyd and the OODA Loop (finally!)

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. Loyalty is not something that people distribute to all and any that they come into contact with regardless of warrant. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Part 3- Lean Cust. Steve Blank’s Lean Startup Resources. Lean Startup Circle â?? free, distributed source code control management system. Lean project management. Customer Development. Lean Startups.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Especially if you aren’t from around Silicon Valley. I too am looking for someone to work with that knows the manufacturing and distribution end of a solid product. thanks to advice like yours, people like me spent that time developing rather than begging for money. Cant wait for more posts on Techcrunch [link] ?

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

How to stay lean and iterate quickly while you’re building a two sided marketplace, especially when “network effect” and “critical mass” are the two main focuses? I have 2 options: set up a new startup or share my idea with google (or maybe another big silicon valley’s company). 1) Hire A’s.

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44