Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 312

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 312

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

There.com is where Will first met and hired Eric Ries and had the painful and formative experiences that directly led to them starting over and co-founding IMVU while auditing Steve’s Lean LaunchPad course.

Maryland 272

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 272

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. He also said, “The most important hire I made in my time at the JAIC was the chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani.”

Artificial Inteligence 388

Artificial Inteligence Fractional CTO Technology CTO 388

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

He just hired Meg Whitman. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. the ex-CEO of HP and eBay, as CEO of NewTV. Every startup is in a race against time.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. While the Innovation Clusters designated specific areas of the countries where high tech was to occur, it’s the Technology Business incubators located inside these clusters where the startup companies physically reside.

Programming 278

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 278

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. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&#

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 17, 2017

We could design warfighting tactics based on knowing the tactics of our opponent. We could design and manufacture the best systems. In the 21st century you need a scorecard to keep track of the threats: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, ISIS in Yemen/Libya/Philippines, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, hackers for hire, etc.

Community 212

Community Silicon Valley Technical Review Incubator 212

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

In this business environment, hiring a new CEO who had experience growing a company around a single technical innovation was a rational decision for venture investors. A company developing software would have to buy computers and license software from other companies and hire the staff to run and maintain it. That’s no longer the case.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. I chose to hire engineers from within each of our target markets and set up “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.” These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) He had spent 12 years at DEC , first as a hardware engineer designing part of the PDP-16 , then as the marketing manager for the LSI-11 and then into sales.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

With that initial sales “success” they began to hire and staff the sales department per the ”plan.” The company had designed and built their product and assumed it was going to sell well based on their initial early orders. Cash was flowing out of the company and the VP of Sales was still hiring. But now the bill had come due.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. Engineering designs made back then with the aim of figuring out the product were not the right designs for the company’s current task of expanding to new platforms.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

AUGUST 25, 2015

and 2) Why are startups innovative by design but companies are innovative by exception?–left Why Startups are Innovative by Design. Most common is when startups do find a repeatable and scalable business model they hire people to execute the successful business model. –left me searching for answers.

Lean 120

Lean Entrepreneur Business Model Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. While the Innovation Clusters designated specific areas of the countries where high tech was to occur, it’s the Technology Business incubators located inside these clusters where the startup companies physically reside.

Programming 170

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 170

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

However, there’s a growing belief that the “design preferences” of Chinese consumers are just bad design. TenCents WeChat , (designed for an international market) is the first incredibly popular app in China to dramatically raise the bar for what a good user interface and user experience looks and feels like.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Successful pinball companies didn’t hire Hollywood talent. Meanwhile our company was pouring an enormous amount of dollars into building tools and video compression technology, while also hiring a lot of high-priced Hollywood talent like art directors, and script and story editors. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 207

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

In response, venture capital firms like Sequoia and Andreessen/Horowitz are hiring new partners just to work with their portfolio companies and match them to corporations. Remember, the definition of a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. (

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization (design became more important than the hardware itself and new executives became more important than the current ones).

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization (design became more important than the hardware itself and new executives became more important than the current ones).

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

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. In fact, we would have been better off if we hadn’t hired him as we wouldn’t have confused a warm body with progress.

Silicon Valley 324

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 324

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 175

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

And to keep executing large organizations hire employees with a range of skills and competencies. These will enable firms to embrace innovation by design not by exception. Instead of offering better products or superior service, rent seekers hire lawyers and lobbyists to influence politicians to pass laws that block competition.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 325

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

However, there’s a growing belief that the “design preferences” of Chinese consumers are just bad design. TenCents WeChat , (designed for an international market) is the first incredibly popular app in China to dramatically raise the bar for what a good user interface and user experience looks and feels like.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Blog at WordPress.com.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2009

The assets you can protect may include your “core technology&# like source code, hardware designs, architectures, processes, formulas. Just about anything can be patented : circuits, hardware, software, applied algorithms, formulas, designs, user interfaces, applications, systems. Or it can be your brand , logo or domain name.

Intellectual Property 213

Intellectual Property IP Software Review Non-disclosure Agreement 213

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Large companies have a habit of hiring outside agencies to do market research and customer discovery. You can’t hire outside professionals to test and learn from customer interactions and make decisions for you. Remedy: For radically new ideas you should defer hiring outside agencies until you’ve found product/market fit.

Non-Compete 329

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 329

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So Hiring PR Agencies. They learned a ton. You want us to do this? It’s wrong.

PR 314

PR China Lean Channel 314

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2015

the time needed to design a study. This suggests that they haven’t completed a petal diagram to look at the existing offerings, or analyzed the “job” that someone needs to hire a solution for. In wanting to do so, they overlooked. the need for an IRB (institutional review board,) (especially where patients are involved).

Startup 120

Startup Early Stage Azure Lean 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts. And for sure they were never going to win any design awards. So we not only sent everyone through packaging school, we also brought the packaging design in-house.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

A company developing software would have to buy computers and license software from other companies and hire the staff to run and maintain it. Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.).

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

It only emerges after an intense business model design and search activity based on the customer development process. All of their internal systems are designed to keep doing what they’ve always done best. The hard part is designing all of the systems to enable the success of the startups. And why wouldn’t it be?

Lean 326

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 326

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

.&# And since I saw our ads (but didn’t quite understand them,) I knew marketing was the group that designed them, somehow to get customers to think our products were better than Intel and Motorola’s. The department had hired a recruiter and was interviewing candidates from other chip companies. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Designing the Perfect Building Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building. I was great at “office wars.”)

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

These founders specify, design, and build a fully featured product using classic product development methods without ever leaving their building. Hiring VPs and execs with the right titles but the wrong skills leads to further trouble as high-powered sales and marketing people arrive on the payroll to execute the “plan.”

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So Hiring PR Agencies. They learned a ton. You want us to do this? It’s wrong.

PR 206

PR China Lean Channel 206