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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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

Greycroft is Alan’s venture capital firm that recently raised its second fund ($130 million) with offices in both New York and LA. We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc.

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PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Sea Turtles and VPN – the connections to the rest of the world. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' They are the signs of a leadership frightened not by external enemies but by their own people.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really 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. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. It is to out friend.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

I use the Investment Readiness Level as part of my sessions to help the students understand that being ready for investment means that besides having a pretty PowerPoint, they need to do real work and show Customer Development progress. Since I began incorporating the Investment Readiness Level framework I’ve made three observations.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

The rest of the vertical marketing recruits had similar backgrounds (and similar careers.) (I never could find one from the petroleum industry so I wore that hat along with the VP of Marketing title.) Our head of finite element analysis came from General Motor’s Chevy division, where he headed up one of their analysis groups. (He

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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. Lean Angels.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Brendan McManus said: “Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch [link] #startup #advice [.] The rest is just fluff. There was no proselytizing about any particular methodology, yet the results are compelling.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach ( business model canvas + customer development ) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. The rest is worth reading as well. You’re not joining a big company. steve Am I a Founder?

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. Reply Dave Goulden , on March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm Said: I love the redefinition of the market.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. And the rest is history. I was chief engineer and developer of both those radars while I worked for ITT Electro-Physics Lab in Hyattsville, MD. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

” As the managing editor of Bplans, I’ve had the good fortune to learn about business via the content we share; through interviews with LivePlan customers and other business owners; and thanks to brilliant, informal coaching from people like Tim Berry, Noah Parsons, and the rest of the executive leadership team at Palo Alto Software.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

Silicon Valley 247

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 247

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

So if youre new, consider not paying any attention to the rest of this post, and just diving into the archives, if you havent already. Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. What are the 9 parts of a business model?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. It was so out of character, people were shocked. True? .&#

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

The rest of the progress report sounded just like this. 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). Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port?

Silicon Valley 324

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 324

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

I realize that my 15 minutes up here is all that’s between you and the rest or your life, so if I can keep you awake, I’m going to share 4 short stories from my life. As it turned out, rather than run me out of town on a rail, the two venture capital firms that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually asked me to work with them.

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Philadelphia Miami Thailand Silicon Valley 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 195

Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2010

Thirty plus years ago when I came to Silicon Valley Asian’s and Indian’s in high technology were a small minority and almost none were running companies or in venture capital. Is the rest of the country truly bereft of any remaining talent? Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

Silicon Valley 219

Silicon Valley Venture Capital China New York 219

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan. And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant. to compete.

Business Plan 140

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 140

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. He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us.

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We We need your decision now because we are about to spend $50,000 on new collateral.”

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. Everything else flows from that.

Entrepreneur 276

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 276

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

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. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. BUT, they moved into a nice office off of Sand Hill Road.

Silicon Valley 205

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. By the time I came back to the United States, he was gone from the company.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « The Curse of a New Building Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 » 33 Responses William , on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 am Said: Heh.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. Think YouTube vs. the rest.

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