The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. Hire versatile players and lean into your team The SVB collapse reminded us that staffing matters.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. We hired union laborers to do that. Two paragraphs, Five bullets.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? And we lost money when we did so.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. it was the speed of the applications that customers were using to get their work done. So I was going to give our customers metrics neither they or anyone else had ever seen before.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

After a year and a half of running training and teaching the new Z-8000 and its peripheral chips, I began to figure out that one of the jobs of marketing was to translate what engineering built into a description that our salesmen could use to talk to potential customers. I also knew our customers. But Intel was kicking our rear.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

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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. Handspring’s customers understood what a Personal Digital Assistant was.

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Ben's Blog

MARCH 1, 2011

Some firms hire pure investors, some firms hire operators, some Wall Street analysts, some firms hire sales people, some firms hire lawyers, and others hire reporters. Two aspects of the original vision that deeply depend on the kind of general partners that we hire are: We will help develop founders into CEOs.

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David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

At least 12 months of customer history, generally 20+ enterprise customers or 200+ SMB customers. The mode purpose for funding is (in order of frequency) Sales, Marketing, Market Expansion, Product Development, and Hiring Employees. Pied Piper Inc needs funding to accelerate customer acquisition for its SaaS solution.

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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. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign. None of mine did.) (None of mine did.)

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Posted on March 29, 2009 by steveblank This is post II of how I came to write “ The Secret History of Silicon Valley “ 1974. Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method.

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Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

This 4-part story, however, explores the Austin ecosystem based on the 4Cs framework —  culture , capital , customers , and competencies. It follows up on my posts discussing why early stage startups should — or should not — move to Silicon Valley. Should Early Stage Startups Move to Austin because of Competencies?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

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. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Anybody else got some other ideas?&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. There are just too many of them out there.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Your messages should have been pre-tested with prospects and existing customers way before you go to a show. If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

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. In reality we hadn’t gotten any closer to our goal than the day we hired him. We had accomplished nothing – zero, zilch, nada.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets.

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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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) Driving across the U.S.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

It got bigger by inventing new test and measurement equipment and it hired people who knew how to execute that strategy. Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. However, no markets last forever. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered. Life was good.

Silicon Valley 181

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. I think it is because in the end, customers count. No amount of paid publicity can achieve much if the product fails to make the customer happy.

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did. Our potential customers didn’t seem to be calling for Hollywood stories, characters and narrative. Successful pinball companies didn’t hire Hollywood talent. That’s OK, because we knew better.

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. However, I’ve seen this story repeated time and again, and not just in Silicon Valley. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other?

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Berkonomics

DECEMBER 8, 2016

We’re successful because we specialize in “hard problems” but not in any one vertical market. I’m working with a friend who’s got a Silicon Valley startup which made the mistake of hiring a Romanian development team. Fourth is embracing change.

Offshore 48

Offshore Silicon Valley Vertical Stock 48

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

This is the first of two posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– Building Blocks of Entrepreneurship By the mid 1950’s the groundwork for a culture and environment of entrepreneurship were taking shape on the east and west coasts of the United States.

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Berkonomics

DECEMBER 26, 2013

We’re successful because we specialize in “hard problems” but not in any one vertical market. I’m working with a friend who’s got a Silicon Valley startup which made the mistake of hiring a Romanian development team. Fourth is embracing change.

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Southern California Offshore Silicon Valley Vertical 75

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

And it hires very smart people from the best schools. BTW, by the standards mentioned in the Times article, the following people would never have been interviewed or hired at Google. College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. I love Google.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

And I had hired and fired two people who didn’t work out. The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. Marketing, for example, customer, product organization, et cetera. And I went to my board and I said, “Listen.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 26, 2019

As a vertically integrated company, oWOW cuts costs which are then passed on in the form of lower rental prices to tenants. The housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay area is particularly severe, given the boom in Silicon Valley hires since the 2009 recession.

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San Francisco Oakland Developer California 113

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 31, 2021

They’re popping up in a variety of different verticals, led by one called On Deck and they’re causing a lot of people to ask the question if a very specific and highly relevant continuing professional education and network is buyable in smaller chunks off the shelf… Is college worth it? Finally, there’s the credential. Again, same deal.

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Hearpreneur

AUGUST 19, 2015

We are unbelievably lucky to be here right now, with a team of über-talented people from the best and brightest Silicon Valley companies, at a moment when what a book should be is morphing before our very eyes. 2) Help Others & Improve Upon Customer Service. That’s it. That’s what we do. 3) Love Solving Puzzles.

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