Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

I just had lunch (at my favorite Greek restaurant in Palo Alto forgetting it looked like a VC meetup) with a friend who was technical founder of his company and is now its chairman. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. Filed under: Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

Part-Time VPE 319

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 319

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Draw Your Ideas - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 16, 2010 I saw Jack Dorsey give this talk at The 99% Conference last month. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

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

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.”. ” A good number of startups in Beijing seem driven by the VCs – and not the founders. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 324

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 324

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.”. ” A good number of startups in Beijing seem driven by the VCs – and not the founders. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

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. No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

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. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Founders Pad.

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Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 314

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 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

JULY 8, 2010

Are you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or can you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur? Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis , founder of Mahalo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or you’re not. Taking Sides.

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Venture Capital Entrepreneur Customer Development Partner 229

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Yet in our case the product, the machine as delivered from engineering, was a blank, featureless computer with just an operating system and compilers. Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.) He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.)

Engineer 205

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 205

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. The goal was commercial products, but as scientists and engineers the company’s founders realized that at times the cost of experimentation was failure. Scientists and Engineers as Founders.

Engineer 307

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 307

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Founders operate in a chaotic regime. Victor Hugo.

Silicon Valley 284

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 284

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.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 30, 2014

Scheduling time to look over a surgeon’s shoulder in an operating room is tough. It will have a simulated procedure space that can be configured as an Operating Room, Emergency Room, Intensive Care Unit and other clinical/procedural settings. Getting time to brainstorm with payers or experts in clinical trials is hard.

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San Diego North Carolina Chicago Lean 262

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. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. It was fun watching it happen.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. There were no venture investors. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. And no one who really knew could tell you.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 176

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. Reply The Secret History of Silicon Valley 12: The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2 « Steve Blank , on October 29, 2009 at 12:30 pm Said: [.] to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 185

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.) What happened to him?

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Ajay Kshatriya.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Ajay Kshatriya.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty.

Silicon Valley 173

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 173

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 15, 2011

The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development" ; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Structure : Founders operate in a chaotic regime.

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Startup Early Stage Business Model 118

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 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 188

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

Having started and sold 3 successful bootstrapped businesses, and am now running 1 venture capital backed business ( Coach ), this is a topic I know a thing or two about. As a bootstrapped startup, the only accountability you have is to yourself and to your co-founder if you have one. Something has to give.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Enter OrangeScape.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. What are the timelines?

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. A final note.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). You can get away with effective behavior in a large company. Thank you for sharing this.

Silicon Valley 327

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 327

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

How To Pitch A Product - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , August 4, 2010 I've said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. Dying at 70? Who doesn't?

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2010

The question is whether you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or whether you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis , founder of Mahlo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or your not.

Silicon Valley 224

Silicon Valley Venture Capital China New York 224

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Let this article serve us reminders to founders and boards alike Reply Michael F. Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. Is the story over?

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 212

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

In our case, we’re local in over 200 countries with operations in basically every city on the planet. in developing these new models. We believe that using the customer development process to monetize these assets through new business models can create huge competitive advantage and more speed to market for us and other big companies.

Lean 327

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

And when I wasn’t reading, I was also teaching operations which gave me a pretty good understanding of what we were looking for on the other side. But when the targets lit up, the music and chatter would stop, and the communications would get very professional.

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