Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 30, 2019

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Intellectual Property 219

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 219

Eric Friedman

MAY 1, 2023

Then about two years ago, I reunited with one of the smartest CTOs I know and we began connecting our old engineer network with early stage companies that needed to ship faster. Putting engineers into companies that need them is an incredible feeling. Its been empowering, exhilarating, and humbling.

Technical Review 117

Technical Review Engineer Early Stage Operations 117

Hunter Walker

MAY 13, 2023

per engineer.” Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. “Worst case scenario we’ll sell to a larger startup or public company for about ~$1.5m

Early Stage 117

Early Stage Cap Table Acquisition Sales 117

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. We were going to toss teaching the business plan aside and try to teach engineering students a completely new approach to start companies – one which combines customer development, agile development, business models and pivots.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 15, 2022

Old-school approaches like the Waterfall methodology remain too risky for businesses still in a highly revenue-challenged state early in their operations. For example, Lean Startup offers many benefits to emerging organizations, especially considering its focus on crafting a minimum viable product (MVP).

Incubator 188

Incubator Startup Software Developers Software Development 188

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome, our guest is Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement. 01:17 Background, before the Lean Startup. 22:53 Eric’s book: The Lean Startup.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 14, 2014

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Entrepreneur 283

Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 283

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 1, 2017

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Product Development 177

Product Development Cost Developer Product 177

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2019

In the first post , we drilled down into the often-overlooked notion of “market-engineering” and why it’s so critical. This is a key part of the market-engineering process — although strictly speaking it’s part of the go-to-product phase. As you develop your product, you must concurrently invest in market-engineering tasks.

Cleveland 150

Cleveland Framework Marketing Early Stage 150

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Intellectual Property 309

Intellectual Property Technical Review Venture Capital Startup 309

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 12, 2018

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (25 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Intellectual Property 134

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 134

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

Hopefully, by bringing on strong partners early, you will get great advice and support to minimize your overall dilution down the road. They find weak pre-seed investors or angels who are almost predatory in their early stage pricing and add no value. Experienced founders: Consumer.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. Today the U.C. Seeing Is Believing.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 7, 2017

These five strategies are proven to work for early-stage companies in a variety of industries — including, perhaps, yours. During development itself, utilize engineering simulation software to reduce prototyping costs and shorten trial-and-error timelines. Stay Lean and Low. They quite literally can’t afford to wait.

Cost 100

Cost Developer Small Business Administration Marketing 100

SVPG

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I held off a little on this because he has been working on a book which has just recently been published, called “ The Lean Startup ” and in this article I’d like to discuss the key concepts in the book and provide that mapping. Using my nomenclature, I consider this a book primarily about product discovery.

Lean 63

Lean Stealth Portfolio Engineer 63

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 8, 2015

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 30, 2009 Techstars brings The Lean Startup to Boulder Im very excited to announce a pair of events that will kick off a very busy fall speaking tour. The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. We’ll teach over 175 NSF Innovation Corps teams in the Lean LaunchPad course in 2012. Team EngineKites.

Lean 256

Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Mucker Lab

MAY 28, 2020

Until you have product-market fit, hire builders: engineers, designers, and growth and product people. Sometimes founders misapply lean startup methodology. The anxiety is growing so intense that CB Insights is now charging $6,895 for its own “List of Early-Stage Tech Startups Running Out of Cash (Dying).”

Startup 78

Startup Cofounder Burn Rate Technical Review 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, June 9, 2009 The Lean Startup Tokyo edition I had a blast speaking at Startonomics Tokyo , which was organized to foster ties between the startup cultures in Japan and Silicon Valley. christinelu : if youre building a disruptive innovation.the only people who you want to talk to are early adopters.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Japan Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. That new book is about to hit bookstores everywhere.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. In building the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference , we’ve tried to strike a balance. To give you a sense of these practitioners, we asked some our new speakers to talk about how they use Lean Startup methods. Below are three of their takes on MVPs.

Lean 162

Lean Startup Ratchet New York City 162

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

View from Seed

JULY 21, 2022

RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder? EP: Getting to live in the mindset that everything is “figure-outable” has by far been my favorite part of being an early-stage founder. IH: Day-to-day life in this early stage can be incredibly stressful- filled with fires to put out and uncharted waters.

Early Stage 156

Early Stage San Francisco Michigan Portfolio 156

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. But all things are never equal. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

Plus, most early-stage M&A fails so this isn’t likely a good use of capital for a young company). ” Stay lean and only raise a big round if you DO find product / market fit and which point you want to loosen the belt quickly and raise the capital to do so. We want a strong balance sheet (um, ok.

Burn Rate 383

Burn Rate Balance Sheet .Net Valuation 383

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 22, 2012

Let’s start out with the basic functions of a tech company: 1) Engineering 2) Marketing 3) Sales 4) Business development 5) PR 6) Design 7) Product Management 8) HR 9) Operations 10) Finance Ok, that's just overwhelming. Getting people to join your company is a key goal of early PR. Ready to start simplifying?

PR 144

PR Technical Review Seed Stage Design 144

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Following is his advice to early stage entrepreneurs for creating structure in their company. So, I’ll explain my reasoning through the story of ASC, a fictitious company that has a combination of characteristics I’ve seen across a number of early stage companies.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Another advantage of the early stages is that most dont have to juggle too many competing priorities. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. It wasnt a huge time commitment, but it meant that every engineer was getting regular contact with an actual customer, which was invaluable. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 22, 2015

A massive rain storm blew through San Francisco in the middle of last year’s Lean Startup Conference. Why You Should Join Us in 2015 Since 2011, The Lean Startup has helped countless ventures transform ideas into thriving businesses. We woke up to a city-wide power outage, and Day Two of the conference had stopped before it started.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Startup Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300