Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Taking My Class.

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Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009 - Business of Software Blog , May 4, 2010 "In the old days, getting customers was easy. 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. You could just outspend. Tesla is not.

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Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Yet two smart VC firms, Sigma and Matrix Partners, realized that somewhere in this mess there was value. Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. And with all of that they had gone broke, out of business and into Chapter 11.

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Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

ReadWriteStart

JULY 21, 2011

When we were trying to raise money for E.piphany, my last startup, I was negotiating with a venture capital firm called Infinity Capital. But it was my eighth startup and my partner Ben was even more experienced. Enterprise software means across the Enterprise. Enterprise software means across the Enterprise.

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Post-Money Valuation Valuation IPO Venture Capital 122

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. I trained the Startup Weekend Next Beijing mentors and instructors, presented to several hundred entrepreneurs, and had a great fireside chat with Zhen Fund founding partner Xu Xiaoping in front of another roomful of entrepreneurs.

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Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 267

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. Bend needed its own venture firm.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Electron-based Venture Capital. Here’s why.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

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. It’s just a story about what happened to me. Are These Your Slides? Good stuff too.

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. I trained the Startup Weekend Next Beijing mentors and instructors, presented to several hundred entrepreneurs, and had a great fireside chat with Zhen Fund founding partner Xu Xiaoping in front of another roomful of entrepreneurs.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 159

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Never mind The first idea for our new company was a software product that looked something like Hypertext. Supercomputers get Personal Back in Sunnyvale my friend had not only been hired but had convinced the team that we should be building hardware – making a new class of computers not a software application.

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. If you use software like LivePlan, you can create this initial “lean plan” in under an hour and then spend your time where it really matters—on validating your idea.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

While this signaled that investments in technology companies could be very lucrative, both Shockley and Fairchild could only be funded through corporate partners – there was no venture capital industry. government backed venture firms and limited partnerships. government backed venture firms and limited partnerships.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

At Palo Alto Software, I am surrounded by entrepreneurs. Our LivePlan customers are entrepreneurs, our founder and staff have run and sold companies, the Bplans readers are aspiring entrepreneurs (or actual entrepreneurs), and as I sell my own handmade jewelry, I like to think I have a very small claim to the title. The competition.

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Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 30, 2014

However, one of the bottlenecks in actually doing Customer Discovery for medical devices/health care is testing how minimal viable products work in-context. Testing hypotheses with doctors, patients, payers, providers, purchasing departments, strategic partners is hard. It Takes a Village.

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San Diego North Carolina Chicago Lean 261

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Their company can focus in any area– software, hardware, medical device or a service of any kind. Class 1 Jan 4 th Intro/Business Model/Customer Development. How’s the Class Organized?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. this may be a useful read. What didn’t? Go to trade shows like it matters.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? 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. Vlad is also the CEO at DarwinApps , a software development shop.

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Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

The Torch program created Innovation Clusters by creating national Science and Technology Industrial Parks (STIPs), Software Parks, and Productivity Promotion Centers. In addition to the 54 Science and Technology Industrial Parks, the Torch program also set up an additional 32 Torch Program Software Parks. Lessons Learned.

Programming 278

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 278

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

This week teams figured out how to measure mission achievement and success, and our advanced lectures were on activities, resources and partners. The OODA loops and the four steps of Customer Development and the Lean Methodology are rooted in the same “get of the building/get eyes out of your cockpit” and “speed and urgency” concepts.)

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San Diego Metrics Indonesia Silicon Valley 142

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. – was his job.

Silicon Valley 324

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 324

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Five Reasons You Haven’t Launched - Software By Rob , November 10, 2010 Photo by stevendepolo. 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. Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) Partners Booths While your booth may be small, some of your potential or existing partners may have much larger ones, in much more visible locations. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Video 139

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

The Torch program created Innovation Clusters by creating national Science and Technology Industrial Parks (STIPs), Software Parks, and Productivity Promotion Centers. In addition to the 54 Science and Technology Industrial Parks, the Torch program also set up an additional 32 Torch Program Software Parks. Lessons Learned.

Programming 170

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 170

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods. There are still no laws like that in the venture capital business. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

Secondly, they had an owned & operated (O&O) website – Google.com – and Overture had shut down GoTo.com at the request of their very profitable and large distribution partners. Bill had previously created a packaged software company called Knowledge Adventure the produced children’s educational software.

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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. In some ways it’s more important (although it doesn’t have any control over the business), and that’s the Board of Advisors.

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Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

The Next Web

DECEMBER 30, 2012

How to Build a Startup (EP245) by Steve Blank: You’ll learn the key steps of the Customer Development process. How to identify and engage the first customers for your product, and how to gather, evaluate and use their feedback to make your product, marketing and business model far stronger. CS169.1x: Software as a Service.

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Artificial Inteligence Founder Private Equity Ruby 156

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

It needs to be more mature, so let’s focus on the small-sized companies where my ideal customer and the people that pull out credit cards is in general the CEO. Jason: And to me, trying to replace someone’s to-do software or their actual organization software? They’re doing something else by that point.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

blog comments powered by Disqus About Ben Yoskovitz Im a Founding Partner at Year One Labs , an early stage accelerator in Montreal. It's easy for them to get burnt out working hard to get a company up and running. They need a shot at a pot of gold. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it).

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Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

No one will say work less and go home and spend time with your partner and/or family. Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. In Meebo’s case, for example, I was lucky enough to partner up with Elaine and Sandy. No looking for partnerships (who’s going to partner with you anyway?). No phone system. No legal muck.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Out of Stanford Business School she went to work for Apple as an evangelist and then joined Ansa Software , the developer of Paradox, a Mac-database. When I ran Rocket Science our corporate partners were in Japan (Sega), Germany (Bertelsmann) and Italy (Mondadori) and some travel was unavoidable. Document every step.

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Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 331

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. Law firm partners often have anger management issues, but the thing about anger is that it is not always wrong to be angry — if somebody is angry at you because you did something wrong, then that anger is valid.

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Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110