Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

So in 2011, with support from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center in the Stanford Engineering School), we created a new capstone entrepreneurship class – the Lean LaunchPad. When we started this class, the concept of Lean (business models, customer development, agile, pivots, mvp’s) was new to everyone.

Lean 248

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 248

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. Here’s a guest post from Frank.

San Jose 256

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 256

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

OCTOBER 25, 2010

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. At the same time every computer company was writing its own operating system. Soon standard operating systems (e.g. It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development.

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

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

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

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. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. A message that is brilliant today and gets the press writing about you and customers begging to buy your product could have been met with blank stares two years ago and may be obsolete next year. they’ll win.).

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Teams talk to 10-15 customers a week and make a minimum of 100 customer visits.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Whether they’re using a formal process to search for a business model like Customer Development or just trial and error, startup founders are intuitively goal-seeking to optimize their business model. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.).

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. Jeff served in the U.S.

Oakland 301

Oakland Asia Lean Video 301

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was an aggressive, young and a very tactical VP of marketing at Ardent , a supercomputer company – who really hadn’t a clue about the relationship between profound beliefs, customer discovery and strategy. I was a great marketer.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

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. And if they’re smart they’ll teach Horizon 1 teams to operate with mission and intent , not just process and procedure.).

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

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. I saw something that they didn’t and to their credit…Berkeley’s Business School and then Stanford’s Engineering School let me write and teach a new course based on my ideas.

Lean 221

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 221

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Instead of adopting the management techniques of large companies, which too often stifle innovation in a young start up, entrepreneurs began to develop their own management tools. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.” Happy Thanksgiving.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards. Who would have known?

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

But a decade earlier as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, he was the father of the second offset strategy using software and semiconductors to build smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth aircraft that helped end the Cold War. Second: I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

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. Fear of Failure.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

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

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

—— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Finnish private investors don’t yet have enough time-in-grade to have developed good pattern recognition skills, and most lack operating backgrounds.

Finland 324

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 324

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

But the best founders I know almost always operate as though they have much less money in the bank, and won’t scale burn until they are super confident in their product/market fit. Experienced founders: B2B. For an experienced founder building in B2B, the round to skip is the pre-seed.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

A Proof of Concept center, which is not the same as a full-fledged incubator, would also be responsible to develop a companywide core competence in business model and open innovation design and a VC-like, staged-risk funding decision criteria for new market opportunities. Lessons Learned.

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

To continually innovate, companies need to operate at startup speed and cycle time much longer their 20 th century counterparts did. A few, like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Don Valentine at Sequoia, had operating experience in a large tech company. Where is it going? The founders. The founders. We now understand that’s wrong.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2012

For the next several weeks, the entire E.piphany engineering department worked with Autodesk’s sales operation team to build a prototype using real Autodesk data. The worst case was that we could tell our engineering team that we should have won but the game was rigged. A Match Made in Heaven.

Forecast 290

Forecast Sales Matching Customer Development 290

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

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Delivery platforms are the vehicles through which customers come to interact with your product. It has a growth engine.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention. There is no easy road.

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

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. Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos spent 20+ years in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

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 Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

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. Fear of Failure.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

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

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

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. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

Now has never been a more important time to have a website – many physical stores have also started operating as online stores, allowing them to take in business during lockdown. Some of the most effective online marketing tactics include: SEO (search engine optimization). Social media marketing. Email marketing.

Marketing 246

Marketing Social Media PPC SEO 246

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