Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I’m a software engineer by trade, so I’m always interested in some better way to do things, whether they are in software or in business processes or organizations. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 129

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. But the rest of the management team really skeptical.

Video 180

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

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.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry.

Silicon Valley 282

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282