Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. billion U.S.

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Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

The idea of exploitation versus exploration was central in my own work in building the lean methodology for start-ups. The key was the realization that start-ups are not simply smaller versions of large companies, which execute/ exploit known business models, and whose customers, problems, and necessary product features are all “knowns.”

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. This information isn’t hard to find.

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Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

Some very early dollars may be required to assemble the early team, in which case I’d lean towards bringing on some angels who are willing to invest in a company at a very favorable price. There are always exceptions, on both the positive and negative side, and many companies really shouldn’t be raising venture capital at all.

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Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. The NSF will fund 100 science and engineering research projects every year. billion U.S.

Engineer 278

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 278

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

Engineer 305

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. Do you have thoughts on specifically how to restructure startups?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas ( activities, resources , partners , and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”. This post is a continuation of the series.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

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.). Tiffani was also a 2014 Code for America Fellow working with the City of Atlanta. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. Clay : Yeah.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

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

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress. When I first read about the Investment Readiness Level (IRL) on Steve’s blog, I was excited by Steve’s attempt to bridge the capital-efficient Lean Startup process for founders with the capital-raising process for funders.

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Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 306

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) 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. Looking forward for your future posts.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

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 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. Venture Capital Issues. Venture Capital.

Startup 294

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 294

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

In my last post I described my approach to one of the three classes I teach at Stanford in the engineering school: Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner. ——————-.

Business Model 226

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 226

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 144

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 18, 2010 Four myths about the Lean Startup Myth: Lean means cheap. Lean startups try to spend as little money as possible. Truth: The Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Myth: The Lean Startup methodology is only for Web 2.0/internet/consumer

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2011

I spent a few days in March in Ann Arbor Michigan as a guest of Professor Thomas Zurbuchen , Associate Dean for Entrepreneurial Programs, and Doug Neal , Director of Center for Entrepreneurship in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. Venture Capital ; met with the local hardware/software venture capital firm.

Michigan 307

Michigan Silicon Valley Venture Capital Incubator 307

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

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.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. Berkeley, joined me in launching the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class and now has been teaching his own Lean LaunchPad class at Princeton. These notes were derived (read: stolen) from the Lean LaunchPad Educator’s guide.

Lean 282

Lean Cofounder Dividend Business Model 282

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. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.) Class 1 Jan 4 th Intro/Business Model/Customer Development.

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

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. 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

MAY 12, 2015

After seeing the results of 500+ teams through the I-Corps, the NSF now offers all teams who’ve received government funding to start a company an introduction to building a Lean Startup. The SBIR/STTR program made ~6,200 seed stage investments in 2014, dwarfing the seed investments made by venture capital.

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SBIR Maryland Lean Seed Stage 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.) 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

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. No kidding.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. Reply 4 Anti-Lean Startup Archetypes at Market By Numbers , on August 4, 2009 at 11:30 am Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I also knew our customers. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. In reality it would be another 20 years.)

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

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.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Brendan McManus said: “Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch [link] #startup #advice [.] Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209