Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. At the last board meeting our VP of engineering explained that the root of our problems was ‘our code has accumulated a ton of “technical debt,’ it’s really ugly code, and it’s not the way we would have done it today. In reality this is a fools choice.

Part-Time VPE 319

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 319

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. Entrepreneurial Culture.

China 324

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 324

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. Entrepreneurial Culture.

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

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."

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Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

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. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Hire around you to fill those weak spots. …. Will : Yes, and that was my first brutal intro into the difficulties of raising venture capital where I lived. . Steve : There is probably is no venture capital for 50 miles, if not 500 miles. . Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. If you have no network, you will not be able to hire the best people in San Francisco. Fundraising. Join an accelerator.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. We hired union laborers to do that. Two paragraphs, Five bullets.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. They used Customer and Agile development to search for a scalable and repeatable business model to become a large company. They hired a world-class team with co-founders and early employees who shared their vision. The Scalable Startup.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. The department had hired a recruiter and was interviewing candidates from other chip companies. I also knew our customers. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. But Intel was kicking our rear.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Theoretically, that’s why I hired them. You don’t delegate life and death.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab.

Silicon Valley 144

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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. VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

In another example, at GroupSpaces we use services from Recurly to power our subscription billing engine and Assistly to power our helpdesk, which helped us to get up and running within a day. Derek Sivers: How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen. Before I continue, you should have read the following three posts.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

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 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. There are close to 100 specialized incubators for companies founded by returned overseas Chinese scientists and engineers. Lessons Learned.

Programming 280

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 280

www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

I gave him similar numbers to what I had been given when I was hiring the first few employees for Standout Jobs. This is especially true when you think of a tech startup, where the first few hires are typically engineers/programmers. But I also told him that I though the numbers were wrong. .&# 1% is just not a lot.

Equity 41

Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Truth: There’s nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Myth: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback. But they do not blindly do what customers tell them , nor do they mechanically attempt to optimize numbers.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. There are close to 100 specialized incubators for companies founded by returned overseas Chinese scientists and engineers. Lessons Learned.

Programming 172

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 172

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. Storm Clouds - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 12, 2010 We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. Call it facts for hire. This post is an accusation. call to arms. What went wrong?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

There’s more interest on the business school students and engineer students than there’s ever been. I’ve seen so many of my colleagues are hiring entrepreneurship directors, creating new programs. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111 Filed under: Customer Development.

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Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York 120

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

Having started and sold 3 successful bootstrapped businesses, and am now running 1 venture capital backed business ( Coach ), this is a topic I know a thing or two about. 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.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department. Have a loud product demo; give away pieces of candy; hire a masseuse and offer free back rubs. Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 185

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. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.” How could it go wrong? Little did I know.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. Who would have known? Why was it occurring here?

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David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. mentor VCs, e.g., most VCs.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. VP of Sales? Wait a minute. where am I?

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 181

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&#

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 251

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 212

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The problem is that there are no other metrics they can look at to judge the content of a book to know if it’s worth reviewing.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Now we have ditched the cold war triad in the 21st century since the Soviet Union became Russia again and discovered its own style of capitalism.) Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union.

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Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 202