Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Todd Branchflower took my Lean LaunchPad class having been entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. True to his word, fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching computer engineering at the Air Force Academy. ——-.

Lean 262

Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 262

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 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

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.” In sharp contrast, start-ups operate in “search/ explore ” mode, seeking a repeatable and profitable business model.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

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. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Lets start with what the product manager does.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

Second, doing customer discovery via video actually increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. The eight teams spoke to over 945 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc. Jeff Decker a Stanford social science researcher.

Oakland 301

Oakland Asia Lean Video 301

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

They could have helped us anticipate and solve organizational challenges and agree on how we planned to manage the risks. We should have asked for a broader innovation time off and incentive policy for employees, managers, and executives. 3) We unknowingly set up an organizational conflict on day one. Lessons Learned.

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

NYU Engineering Commencement Speech. Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker.

Lean 221

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 221

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. Management 101.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Embracing the principle of genchi gembutsu – translated in English as “go and see for yourself” – Ries regaled how Toyota’s manager for Sienna minivan Yuji Yokoya went on a 53,000 mile trip around North America to understand firsthand what consumers wanted in a minivan.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), Second: I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here. Examples are a company-owned manufacturing facility, big data or machine learning engineers, DOD proposal writers, venture capital, etc. It’s a ton of work.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. But I’m not convinced those labels are right at all.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. Filed under: Customer Development. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

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

JULY 13, 2021

The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. Its purpose was to educate management on best practices to run existing companies. Here’s why and what we did about it. that took place in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. Management 101.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

They communicated this to product management who looked at all of the internal requirements we had generated (e.g. some came from our customer service, some were to improve performance / scalability from tech ops, some were bug fixes, etc.) and product management worked with me to decide what to build & when.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise.” ” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. 4) Staffing.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

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. Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.).

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

The Yin and Yang of Product and Engineering - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 22, 2010 For a tech company, product and engineering are the heart and soul of the business. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. We'll be your hosts for a three-part series about the use of MongoDB here at Etsy.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Search 320

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. He had introduced the idea that customers don’t buy a product, rather than they hire it for a “job to be done.”

Lean 428

Lean Business Model Government Agile 428

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof. There was nothing for the consumer to do.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. Teten: How is the corporate VC model evolving: in how they interact with portfolio companies or the operating side of their organization? It can help develop applications for the startup’s technology in its early days.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

This second kind of seed financing can be a double-edged sword for the entrepreneur and company if not very carefully managed. Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. This is all a part of the normal product and customer development process,” the CEO tells the team.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

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. And in the tradition of great startups, on the way out Perry took 6 of his best managers with him.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

The eight teams spoke to over 820 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc. Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the presentations are worth a watch. Team: Panacea. Jeff served in the U.S.

Oakland 266

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 266

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. 4) Manage deal flow. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce. Google Ventures (GV). Pitchbot.vc

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2013

Todd Branchflower was one of my Lean LaunchPad students entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. Fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching electrical engineering at the Air Force Academy. He promised that one day he would fix that.

Silicon Valley 255

Silicon Valley Colorado Lean Connecticut 255

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. Entrepreneurs in Bend.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2014

Inaugural Class Academy of Innovation Management. The curriculum draws from Philadelphia University’s design, engineering, and business disciplines, as all are needed to make innovation relevant in the government. Business and Operations Models – How to describe, design, challenge, and evaluate innovation.

Government 301

Government Philadelphia Lean Customer Development 301