Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 21, 2009

On the third Wednesday of every month I co-chair a meeting called the SoCal VCA (venture capital alliance), which represents participants from all of the top venture capital firms in Southern California as well as prominent members of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA). What have been your experiences in the past 6 months?

Technical Review 241

Technical Review IPO Southern California Venture Capital 241

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

SiliconHills

DECEMBER 12, 2014

Other participating in the round were Noro-Moseley Partners, Harmony Partners, Altos Ventures and Capital Factory. The Austin-based startup plans to use the money on office expansion, product development and new vertical markets.

Venture Capital 106

Venture Capital Vertical Austin Social Media 106

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

Each month, we pick an up-and-coming vertical or theme and do a deep dive (with the help of Mattermark … portfolio plug). And being thesis-driven makes us more efficient when filtering through all the startups we see. In addition to developing our investment thesis, we recognize that VC is still an industry built on relationships.

Venture Capital 162

Venture Capital Portfolio Vertical Technical Review 162

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

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. Our competitor was executing on hypotheses we had developed 9 months ago, and their strategy remained static. See part one for the first time it happened.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

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. The assets were a series of products already developed and on the market or in the development pipeline. The first step was to recruit a new management team.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

We worked closely together on this exciting new investment. ** While still very much in its infancy when it comes to development and adoption, a decentralized financial system has the ability to be massively disruptive and important for decades to come. This post was written with my colleague Amit Kumar.

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Web Silicon Valley Technical Review Artificial Inteligence 48

Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

Looking for Funds in All the Right Places: The Definitive Guide to Austin Capital By David Altounian and Stephen Straus OVERVIEW For entrepreneurs: We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of capital in Austin to help focus your fundraising efforts. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin.

Venture Capital 54

Venture Capital Austin Texas Private Equity 54

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

VC Cafe

MAY 23, 2023

On the other hand, check out ProductHunt or a few AI newsletter and you’ll quickly hear about more than 1,000 generative AI startups, with new ones popping up daily. Is it startups or incumbents? As I mentioned in my post on the LLM Benchmarking , venture capital investment in AI startups was down 43% in Q1 2023.

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Generative AI Artificial Inteligence ChatGPT API 165

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 8, 2019

2- Transformative development. 2019 was full of transformative development for Intellifluence. Throughout that development process the marketing team kept pressing, leading the company to 50,000 influencers over the Summer, which made us the largest warm contact influencer network in the market. Lancaster ! #2-

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 120

thebarefootvc

AUGUST 13, 2013

These vertical solutions would focus on specific pain pain points in the enterprise, such as logistics or customer relationship management. Client-server has moved to the cloud (dramatically decreasing the cost of software development and deployment), and mobile apps are everywhere. Fast forward to 2013.

Advisory Board 70

Advisory Board Cloud Venture Capital Vertical 70

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It took lots of trial and error, learning by experience and resilience through multiple failures.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Consider what followed since November: New foundational models, more efficient ways of training models etc An explosion of open source models, the rise of HuggingFace Breakthrough research across voice, video, text, multi modality, etc Billions of dollars invested in thousands of startups at the application layer of generative AI.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

Customer Development 212

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 212

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

Each month, we pick an up-and-coming vertical or theme and do a deep dive (with the help of Mattermark – portfolio plug). And being thesis-driven makes us more efficient when filtering through all the startups we see. News investment thesis Mattermark values venture capital' Compassion.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Portfolio Vertical Technical Review 60

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance.

Revenue 60

Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

Version One Ventures

APRIL 8, 2014

Thus, it should come as no surprise that we are now seeing Venture Capital being disrupted by these forces as well. In his post The Disruption of Venture Capital , Albert Wenger described VC as “the club you had to be invited into.”. Enter Mattermark: where “Big Data Meets Venture Capital”.

Venture Capital 160

Venture Capital Vertical Curation SEC 160

cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret. I have a personal diligence rule that when speaking to people at large companies, the facts that they tell you are very useful but their opinions about startup ideas no more valuable than any other smart person’s opinions). Peter Coles. Jon Russell. Jonah Peretti. Lauren Leto.

Stealth 68

Stealth Startup NDA Cofounder 68

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brendan McManus, [Startup Digest]. Startup Digest] said: Thanksgiving Day [link] [via @sgblank] [.] Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 137

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ).

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The slides are here.

Customer Development 139

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2018

We wanted to learn more about the nuanced industry market forces before applying the same hands-on investing model we do with tech startups in other verticals. We don’t seed companies that are developing drugs or medical devices that will require FDA approval. They can be surprisingly capital efficient.

Vertical 120

Vertical Stealth Portfolio Seed Capital 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. We were sitting in our cheap hotel room when the phone rang.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. what Market Type is your startup?

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Version One Ventures

JULY 21, 2020

The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company. We develop our own conviction and are not afraid to lead or invest when others do not. Technology changes. We’ve quietly made changes to our website.

Founder 213

Founder Vertical Differentiation Portfolio 213

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. This post describes such a model.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. The VC firm delivered a term sheet for an 8-digit second round that afternoon.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. So much so that after I started teaching I’d ask, “Can anybody recognize this model of startups?

Product Development 143

Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 143