View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

The reason is that b2b fundraising is largely driven by data and metrics, and pre-seed dollars usually don’t get you to many meaningful data points. Most series A’s in B2B require a minimum level of top line revenue and a minimum amount of historical data to prove retention and some sort of repeatable growth engine.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth. Dan McKinley will show the math he used to test new ideas as an engineer during the early days at Etsy. He’ll bring us real-world advice.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. Customer Development works outside Silicon Valley.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Software Engineer Steven VanRoekel CIO Dan Greenberg Co-Founder & CEO CHECK OUT THE AGENDA. > Seth Sternberg Co-Founder & CEO Scott Chacon CIO Kevin Hale Senior Product Manager NEW! Juan Diego Calle CEO Dharmesh Shah Co-founder & CTO Ross Snyder Sr.

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Lean is The Engine for the Ambidextrous Organization. Fast forward to today. We can adapt these startup tools for use inside the corporation.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He Founders that learn are more successful : Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

We have a slew of workshops you can choose from—the last two just added: Validate Your Learning Engines with Janice Fraser and Laura Klein. In this workshop, Fraser, Founder/CEO of LUXr and Klein, Director of Product & UX at One Jackson will offer practical techniques for getting and using customer feedback.

Lean 154

Lean Cofounder Analytics Startup 154

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

1:46: The Differences: Accounting, Engineering & Sales. 2:21: Accounting Metrics in a Large Company vs. Metrics that Matter in a Startup. 6:07: Engineering: Waterfall Development in a Large Company vs. Minimum Viable Product in a Startup. 1:49: Use Customer Development to Test Your Hypotheses.

Founder 327

Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

JUNE 21, 2017

6:22 What’s Customer Development. 7:11 Agile Engineering – Eric Ries. 32:05 No Innovation Pipeline, Guidance or Metrics. Or just parts of the interview: 1:20 Failure and Lessons Learned. 2:35 The origins of the Lean Startup. 3:35 Startups are not smaller versions of a larger company. 32:55 Teaching Lean.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Lean Government Boston 222

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

ConversionXL

MARCH 4, 2020

Don’t choose metrics that are similar but not the same. Otherwise, it’s easy to turn a small discrepancy into a massive issue—one that torches year-over-year data comparisons and just about all of your quarterly (even annual) metrics. Every tool has its own methods for various metrics. Why does it happen? Image source ).

Analytics 88

Analytics IP Metrics Conversion 88

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. This is a great configuration for a starting team. Here’s why. Your Process Doesn’t Work.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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. I couldn’t care less about those.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Labels: customer development , split-test 7comments: Editor said.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. I want to add one last idea, even though I recognize it is controversial, bordering on the boundary between the CTO and VP Engineering. Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 8, 2010 Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Review) The next article in my series on entrepreneurship for Harvard Business Review is live today. Once again, we revisit the topic of Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics. Remember "metrics are people, too."

Metrics 121

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 121

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress.

Sacramento 306

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 306

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). Third, the tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.)

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

The Next Web

MARCH 11, 2014

Then Ben [one of the mobile engineers on the team] suggested a concept around sticking pieces of media to friends and people in the real world. For the past year, they invested in the team and technology to prioritize speed of iteration with disregard to traditional methods of customer development and company building.

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley Cofounder Stock Options Mobile 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ▼ June (3) What is a startup?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet. This is all a part of the normal product and customer development process,” the CEO tells the team. Three months in, the burn is now at $70k/month.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

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. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. At the same time, it’s a chance to expose some career State Department employees to Silicon Valley thinking.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. At the same time, it’s a chance to expose some career State Department employees to Silicon Valley thinking.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

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. I help lead the Engineering Leadership SIG at SDForum and wonder if you would be interested in speaking to our group about lean starups. hope to hear from you.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And do your customer development. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. When they could hear the customers complaints in their own voice, it became clear when it was time to up the quality level. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.)

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113