Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

70% of Chinese Internet users are under 30. Internet penetration in Beijing is greater than 70% while it’s less than 25% in Yunnan, Jiangxi, Guizhou and other provinces. The slide below from the Zhen Fund shows the breadth of business coverage of each of the Chinese Internet incumbents. New Rules for China.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This methodology forces rapid hypothesis testing and Customer Development by getting out of the building while building the product. And since the rest of the slides were about Customer Development, I taught those.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

We’re now in the second Internet bubble. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups could now get a first version of a product out to customers in weeks/months rather than months/years. Carpe Diem. Tools in the New Bubble.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. China Venture Capital. venture capitalists invested $26.5

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 267

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

Clay stressed that crowdfunding should not replace Customer Discovery: … Customer Development and Customer Discovery need to be moved earlier – before you launch. Because Lean Startup methods, Crowdfunding, Amazon Web Services and the Internet that connects us all, is bringing the cost of failure to zero. .

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. China Venture Capital. venture capitalists invested $26.5

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 159

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. Typically the size of their opportunity and company doesn’t lend itself to attracting venture capital. The Internet has created a series of new and innovative business models. The question was: what did the founders want to do?

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. Welcome to the Internet bubble.) See part one for the first time it happened. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

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.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Later he would leave for a few years to start the Computing Directorate at the National Science Foundation , help spec what became the Internet and then come back and run Ardent’s engineering.) A few days later Gordon became a founder.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule?

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule?

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them. Our first thought was to spread the news ourselves, perhaps in a press release or a “white paper,” (remember this was pre-Internet.)

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. 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 164

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT; it was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the internet. So much for timing. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

“After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. Most of the funds that started in the late part of the boom would be underwater).

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

Is there a junior or senior developer from a previous gig who will respect you for a previous role and be ready to build their own baby with you? So, while you’re slaving away on your customer development while keeping an eye out for your technical match, you could do worse than read Paul Graham’s 2007 essay, How not to die.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

That process involves rapid hypothesis testing, validated learning about customers , and a disciplined approach to product development. internet/consumer software companies. Truth: The Lean Startup methodology applies to all companies that face uncertainty about what customers will want.

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

Jessica has been starting her own Internet businesses and programming since middle school. Especially difficult were the days after the Internet bubble burst: 2001 was a staggering blow to technology. I started working with startups and venture capitalists. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology that helps startups optimize their chances for success while reducing risk. The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Silicon Valley, New York).

Silicon Valley 117

Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

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 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Customer Development.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

Silicon Valley 176

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And thanks to the radical transparency enabled by the internet, the quality of these proposals is actually constantly rising, to the point that it’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the final product – because all the proposals look polished and professional, even the terrible ones.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

This is of course, pre-Internet. It wasn’t like chess taught me how to think multiple layers deep, it was actually that it was a closed system of knowledge, kind of like investment banking or venture capital or startups that once you got in the club someone would actually teach you. I’m surprised you went there.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York 120

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Storm Clouds - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 12, 2010 We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. Competing To Win Deals - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 7, 2010 The venture capital business is highly competitive.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

These posts cover two distinct periods – the first, the rise of “ Microwave Valley ” chronicles the decade of 1946-1956 as Stanford University became the hub of military/industry contracting in the Bay Area. If you want to refer to PVO by name, call it just PVO (acronym for “Air Defense&# in Russian). Reply Nelson A.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 153

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

Venture capital firms like to see CEOs with strong support (beyond the Board of Directors) and that’s what the Advisory Board is there to do. I’ve read a lot on the internet about start-ups, but I didn’t know about mandatory advisory boards. I can’t picture what kind of advisory board they would select.

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Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Rob Go

JULY 16, 2012

What many of the insights around Customer Development have been really impactful to my thinking, there is something that has always bothered me as the “Lean Startup Movement” has gotten more and more formulaic. These posts contain the BEST STUFF ON THE INTERNET RIGHT NOW!!! The table of contents are right here.

Lean 47

Lean Framework Venture Capital Valuation 47

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross , one of the Internet’s true pioneers. He took out an ad in the Yellow Pages (it was the early 80′s, pre Internet), which cost him $1,000 / month for a half-page ad. If it worked in the Yellow Pages, why not on the Internet? Cars Direct / Internet Brands.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

These sources are a lot more forgiving of iterations and pivots than later-stage venture-capital funds. In times of unlimited cash (internet bubbles, frothy venture climates) you can fix your mistakes by burning more dollars. Filed under: Venture Capital. Venture Capital' When to raise money.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 333

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Our VP of Business Development had no problems getting meetings and fund raising was easy. The Digital Dream Team Way before the Internet phenomenon, we had created “Rocket Science the brand ” that was much bigger in size and importance than Rocket Science the company.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

So bowing to popular demand the 2009 blog posts are now available on Amazon on a portable device which provides instant and random access to any post and does not require power or an internet connection. After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 202

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185