Steve Blank

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Early-stage Regional Venture Funds–part 2 of 3 of Bigger in Bend

Steve Blank

Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds. Part 3: Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster. What’s Missing Is Early Stage Capital. Part 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs.

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Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s

Steve Blank

None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “ Hail Mary ” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster. How to Become a VC. Startups are hard. Does it Matter?

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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project

Steve Blank

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. I was feeling pretty old. Max set the record for smarts divided by age.

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Why The Government is Isn’t a Bigger Version of a Startup

Steve Blank

Rather than focus the university inward on research, Terman took the radical step of encouraging Stanford professors and graduate students to start companies applying engineering to pressing military problems. Urgency and risk-taking in a startup are integral parts of the culture, felt by 100 percent of early-stage employees.

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Nokia as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and the Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. You find early stage employees expecting to work normal hours, to get paid a regular salary, and not asking or expecting equity. Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!)

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Organizational Debt is like Technical debt – but worse

Steve Blank

Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to “just get it done” in the early stages of a startup. Surprisingly, given the tidal wave of new hires, formal training and job descriptions were still stuck in the early stage, “we’re too small to need that” mindset. the company had.

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Profound Beliefs

Steve Blank

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. You don’t have a clue about what the purpose of marketing is because all you are doing is giving engineering a list of feature requests and executing a series of tasks like they’re like a big To Do list.