Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Entrepreneurial employees are the talented performers who hear the siren song of a founder’s vision.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’ll bring us real-world advice.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

—— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. At Tekes, government employees (and their hired consultants) – with no equity, no risk or reward, no startup or venture capital experience – try to pick startup winners and losers.

Finland 325

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 325

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. They’ve stopped hiring the best talent, and startups are not looking so risky compared to large companies. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital.

Finland 327

Finland Naming Russia Government 327

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time. Now he really thought I was nuts, replying "from the recruiter who hired me, of course!"

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. This approach gives you an edge in hiring. Instead, engage with the project.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

A pair of wake-up-call studies by the Fournaise Marketing Group in London in 2011 and 2012 found that more than 70 percent of CEOs think that their chief marketing officers lack business credibility, lack the ability to generate acceptable growth, and lack the ability to explain how their programs will lead to increased business. Yeah, right!

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward. Hire around you to fill those weak spots. …. whether that’s partners or employees that you bring on. You have your team.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. Productive Programming - Gabriel Weinberg , August 31, 2010 BIG disclaimer: I'm not formally trained in computer science (aside from two classes at MIT in 2000) and I haven't worked closely with that many programmers or teams (maybe 10 or so).

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Two Jobs at Once When I was hired at Zilog part of the deal was that I could consult for the first six months for my last employer, ESL.

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 181

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany."

Finland 158

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. If done right, a programming interview serves two purposes simultaneously. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Hire the absolute best and the brightest, true experts in their fields, who in turn can hire the smartest people possible to staff their departments. Insist on the incredibly high-IQ employees and hold them to incredibly high standards. Here are a few: We know what customers want. What went wrong?

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

For most of your customers, tech support is the only human interaction they'll have with you. Are you really going to leave that up to your worst-treated, least-paid, least-qualified employees? Apparently tech support is a better "social media outreach" program than hiring interns to spray comments on random blogs.

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) Crossing the Rubicon – The Applied Electronics Lab Setting up a separate Applied Electronics Lab for military funded programs doubled the size of the electronics program at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 144

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 12, 2009 Why PHP won When I first learned to program on the web, Perl + CGI was the dominant platform. Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. Thats simply impossible on most platforms.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. Lets make sure that we have plenty of conference rooms. Everyone left the building for lunch.

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 212

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

MARCH 1, 2016

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward. Brandon’s biggest takeaway from the NSF program had nothing to do with technology: I’ve learned that business is about relationships.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Michigan Detroit 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy happen. Theoretically, that’s why I hired them. I’m curious, how many employees did SuperMac have at that time and what was your approach to educating the company? But these meetings were life and death in our struggle for market share.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Use pair programming and collective code ownership. Pair programming is the most radical, but also the most helpful.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2017

A beneficiary can be a soldier, program manager, commanding general, government contractor, stakeholder, customer, etc.) When the Department of Energy asked BMNT to build a training program for getting veterans into advanced manufacturing jobs, we saw the power of a shared purpose between multiple beneficiaries first hand.

Lean 120

Lean Kansas Government Afghanistan 120

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

These are just a few of the powerful, growth-fostering impacts “Rock Star” customers are creating for a variety of companies. And engaging customers in such ways is generally much less expensive than hiring costly employees or agencies. But it does require some new thinking.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

By 1992 Research in Motion (RIM) had been in business for eight years, had 16 employees, sales of about $500,000 a year, and three or four business lines. That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. It let users record from the familiar program guide. Research in Motion (RIM).

Hockey Stick 272

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 272

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

automatic links to generated images Rietveld - asynchronous code reviews on changesets Tech*if*er0*urs – blog on roadmap for learning rails Best free programming books Project Management Basecamp - web-based project management and collaboration tool. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. It’s more reference material.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

We eventually discovered (via five whys ) that we also had to get each new employee acculturated to a fearless way of thinking. For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. Because this was such a big cultural change for most new employees, we didnt leave them to sink or swim on their own.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

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. We had a great on-boarding process, complete with a mentoring program and a syllabus of key ideas to be covered. What is customer development?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If I have some budget for outside help, should I hire a vendor to help us drive down our payment fraud rates by 1% (ROI easy to predict), or hire a market research firm to give us insights into potential customers (ROI hard to predict)? 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

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Joel is focused on the fact that in many environments, programmers are considered "just the hired help" akin to manual labor, and not treated properly. I would add, though, a further question: Do new employees write code on their first day? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

With 21 employees today, kaChing is devoted to recruiting professional managers and finding product/market fit , first for money managers, then for consumers. With 21 employees today, kaChing is devoted to recruiting professional managers and finding product/market fit , first for money managers, then for consumers. Amazon PostRank

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The team hired only the best and the brightest. Not to be outdone, the technologists on the team had also brought their big guns, and the meeting was packed with employees of every level – from VP’s all the way down to me. The team hired only the best and the brightest. The engineering team wasn’t happy either.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Amazon PostRank

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both. It would be far more useful to discover how Apple really does develop their innovative products it rather than assume that they follow the principles that you and I espouse.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. I think Drucker said it best.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 5, 2016

While many small business owners made preparations such as hiring support staff, placing advance orders, checking inventory and promoting their business, they may not have thought through one important element – how to ensure these holiday customers want to come back long after the season is over.

Customer 100

Customer Distribution Government Agile 100

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

If there ever was any question about the value of China’s Torch Program walk around Zhongguancun. It’s much easier to just steal their ideas and hire their employees. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 269