Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last 10 years China essentially closed its search, media and social network software market to foreign companies with the result that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Dropbox, and 30,000 other websites were not accessible from China. business models. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Of course “copy” is too strong a word.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last 10 years China essentially closed its search, media and social network software market to foreign companies with the result that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Dropbox, and 30,000 other websites were not accessible from China. business models. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Of course “copy” is too strong a word.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

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?

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

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.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

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.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

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. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.” Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh. The first step was to recruit a new management team.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

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

JANUARY 21, 2016

Instead, I went the Software as a Service route and tried to charge for what was a commodity product. We could have let you have the software for free, basically. … Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. There was nothing special about it; you could just book appointments on it.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) And they were responsible for helping our 3 rd party software group reach the right application providers to port their software to our computer. be a user of software (for the consumer use case).

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

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. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 267

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference? Thank you for your great book.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

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.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

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 258

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. 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. The software was idiot proof.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

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. Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany."

Post-Money Valuation 122

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. 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. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 159

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.

Venture Capital 297

Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

Venture Capital Issues. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. The amount of capital being invested in new device companies is at an 11 year low. Venture Capital. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Science and Industrial Policy , Teaching.

Startup 294

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 294

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2011

Venture Capital ; met with the local hardware/software venture capital firm. Incubators : toured the TechArb , the engineering student accelerator, and the Michigan Venture Center in the University’s Tech Transfer Office. You Can’t Start a Fire Without A Spark – A Lack of Venture Capital.

Michigan 307

Michigan Silicon Valley Venture Capital Incubator 307

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.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

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.” The reaction from our software guys was a little less kind. “Are All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

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. Wireframes.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

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. There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Silicon Valley 281

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 281

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. A wave of innovation was about to meet a pile of risk capital.

Engineer 305

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

But we knew something they didn’t; the total available market for color graphics boards was measurable by looking at an adjacent market, the color desktop publishing software market. Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 134

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 18, 2011

Talking to customers is, of course, a good thing. I have seen, however, the customer development process wind up looking like a street corner salesman selling watches out of the inside of his coat. If you don't have unique insight into the nature or the problem, customer development is going to be random and unproductive.

Customer Development 115

Customer Development Developer Customer Lean 115

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers. Software companies had to buy specialized computers and license expensive software. VC’s went back to basics, to focus on building companies while their founders worked on building customers. Tools in the New Bubble.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

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. Those early text-based games were programmed by their own users, and it was by far the best tutorial I could ever have received in the power of software.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

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. What to do next.

Curation 60

Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. I recently completed the Validation step (less the industry analyst presentations) and am ready to move on to Customer Creation. Can I buy you lunch to share it with you? &# Yes, I’m serious. So the ask is made — shall it be given?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 6, 2014

It detailed exactly what everyone was to do at every stage for every product, with instructions for every department ranging from hardware to software, and on to operations, finance, marketing, even the support teams that troubleshoot and repair the product after it goes to market.” Apple Startup general interest Venture Capital'

Product 84

Product Venture Capital Lean Finance 84

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. Single users can test enterprise software using a credit card.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214