Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising.

Silicon Valley 179

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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. I hope this thinking already sounds inane to you. What plan says that?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

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.). Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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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 125

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. The software was idiot proof.

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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

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. Typically the size of their opportunity and company doesn’t lend itself to attracting venture capital. The Internet has created a series of new and innovative business models. The question was: what did the founders want to do?

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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.) Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule?

Silicon Valley 290

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule?

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

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. Is there a junior or senior developer from a previous gig who will respect you for a previous role and be ready to build their own baby with you?

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

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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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

That process involves rapid hypothesis testing, validated learning about customers , and a disciplined approach to product development. internet/consumer software companies. Truth: The Lean Startup methodology applies to all companies that face uncertainty about what customers will want.

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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 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology that helps startups optimize their chances for success while reducing risk. The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Silicon Valley, New York).

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

There’s more interest on the business school students and engineer students than there’s ever been. This is of course, pre-Internet. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111 Filed under: Customer Development. I’m seeing it in real time. I’m surprised you went there. Dave : Exactly.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And thanks to the radical transparency enabled by the internet, the quality of these proposals is actually constantly rising, to the point that it’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the final product – because all the proposals look polished and professional, even the terrible ones.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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. Ask a question and get an answer - that is, after all, what all Q&A sites offer.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single? Sign me up.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

So bowing to popular demand the 2009 blog posts are now available on Amazon on a portable device which provides instant and random access to any post and does not require power or an internet connection. After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 202

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors. Instead, this is a culture clash.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

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. I don’t know any developers. I can’t tell you how frequently teams of three business school students tell me they’re going to start the next great consumer Internet company. Sorry, folks.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. Instead of eight boards, Engineering was going to be able to deliver one new graphics board. One of the reasons I had joined the company was seeing these boards as hope for the future. What could we do?

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 134

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

Frank Rimalovski is the executive director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute and managing director of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. Frank has spent 20+ years in technology companies and venture capital, working at Lucent , Sun Microsystems , Apple and NeXT. It was at that time that I met my co-founder.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Investment Bankers 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications. When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of venture capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally. the wave of internet commerce applications in the first decade of the 21 st century.

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Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts&#. SaaS 101: 7 Simple Lessons From Inside HubSpot - OnStartups , July 19, 2010 It’s been a little over 4 years since I officially launched my internet marketing software company , HubSpot.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Venture Capital Cafe > Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Firebase : Are all your developers front-end engineers? Google Custom Search Engine. Google App Engine. Search Engine Optimization Tools. About VC Cafe. Seed Startups.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

I-Corps teaches scientists and engineers how to get their technical ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace using the Lean Startup processes. If you’re listening on the Internet, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the NSF (The National Science Foundation) were critical in developing the internet.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Washington Government 120