Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2014

This post follows directly on Steve’s earlier excellent post, Why Companies are not Startups. In this post, I want to share some new thoughts that build on Steve’s post, and connect them to Lean Startup methods. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable, scalable business model.

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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. Electron-based Venture Capital. Here’s why.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

What are they, how do they differ and what can startup do to take advantage of them? Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. 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. So I generally feel right at home in these conversations.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales.

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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. 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. Go to trade shows like it matters.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know have they distribute their product? An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 188

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. Lets see why.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Posted on December 3, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups I’ve had my ideas “stolen” twice. In the end, the CEO couldn’t get his board to give us the cash in exchange for the Japanese distribution rights and some equity. Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t. We ended up raising money from Sega.

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www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Home About Contact My thoughts & lessons learned on startups, entrepreneurship, marketing and other stuff. Changing Equity Structures for Early Startup Employees Tweet Recently someone asked me for advice on how much equity they should give to their early employees. the better the startup will be. 1% is just not a lot.

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Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

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. As one could imagine this was the last thing the supercomputer center management wanted to hear.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

There is no certainty about a startup on day-one. You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance.

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Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 219

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 123

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.)

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

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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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods. The CDROM content business in the early 1990’s was one of the many of the long line of venture capital fads.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure. to compete.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

To give you a better idea of what entrepreneurs in this industry are thinking about during each phase of the startup process, I interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs from all over the world, including our own COO Noah Parsons. Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, popularized this strategy for web applications.

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This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 21, 2010

It’s the kind of thing you can repeat in an elevator, simple to understand , universally applicable , and, most importantly, doesn’t burden your tech team with a lot of custom development. If you have a startup that could use a publisher with a large local community as a partner, you have nothing to lose.

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The Next Web

DECEMBER 30, 2012

These are with no doubt worthwhile goals, but I’d like to pose an important challenge for founders: Make learning and development your key resolution in 2013. I’ve gathered a comprehensive list of resources for startup learning. Startup Hiring : How to attract, hire and retain the best people. Let’s get started!

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Artificial Inteligence Founder Private Equity Ruby 156

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

GoTo.com went on to ink huge distribution deals with Microsoft, AOL & Yahoo! Secondly, they had an owned & operated (O&O) website – Google.com – and Overture had shut down GoTo.com at the request of their very profitable and large distribution partners. Immediately thereafter Amazon became a large business.

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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. No, not really, but my partner owns the studio and tells me it’s spectacular and everyone will love it.

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www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White on Building a Successful Startup » FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder. 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. However, I needed to actually build it!

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techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. Problem was, I seemed to suck at the whole startup thing. Rather, I didn’t have anyone around me familiar enough with startups to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Ampex’s first customer was Bing Crosby who wanted to record his radio programs for rebroadcast (and had exclusive distribution rights.) Ampex business took off when Terman introduced Ampex founder Alex Poniatoff to Joseph and Henry McMicking.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Useful blogs and links for startups Click Here ————– 2.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). Venture Capital Cafe > Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). VC & Startup Resources. Seed Startups. VC Cafe covers early stage Israeli and European tech & mobile startups. Hundreds of startups featured since 2005, will yours be next? About VC Cafe.

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