Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2023

Most of her lessons were applicable to any government employee venturing out to the private sector. At the Agency , 85% of my time was spent navigating bureaucracy and equities, arguing for resources and permission for operations, and dealing with the bottom rung of employees, all while making decisions with little data or data overload.

Government 174

Government CTO Hire Technical Review Advisory Board 174

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

In 2006, as a new employee of the Fortune 100 provider of wireless technology and services, San Diego’s Qualcomm , I volunteered to salvage a fledging idea management system (fancy term for an online suggestion box) by turning into a comprehensive corporate entrepreneurship program. Part 1 outlining the program is here. The origin.

Programming 291

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 291

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

In 2006, as a new employee of the Fortune 100 provider of wireless technology and services, San Diego’s Qualcomm , I volunteered to salvage a fledging idea management system (fancy term for an online suggestion box) by turning into a comprehensive corporate entrepreneurship program. Part 1 outlining the program is here. The origin.

Programming 283

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 283

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2014

If you’re a founder, there’s a constant gnawing fear in the pit of your stomach that it will all end badly; running out of money, having to fire all your employees and failing publicly. In large companies, the employees are no less smart, but the organization is optimized to deliver repeatable products, revenue and profits.

Customer Development 335

Customer Development Design Developer Customer 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 26, 2022

They offered desperate founders more cash but insisted on new terms, rewriting all the old stock agreements that previous investors and employees had. Heck, all your prior investors, employees and advisors who trusted and bet on you get nothing, but you and a few key employees come out OK. You’re not. Life is short.

Cram Down 404

Cram Down Founder Venture Capital Recapitalization 404

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

While the company had a great plan for keeping the top executives, and had all the startup perks like free food and dogs at work, they had spent little time thinking about the organization debt accruing with first 100 employees who had built the company underneath them. Identify the employees they wanted to keep. This is hard.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2018

It does mean that success in building a company that scales depends on finding product/market fit, enough customers, enough financing, enough great employees, distribution channels, etc. It doesn’t mean that if you have technical skills you can’t build a successful company. Lessons Learned. Entrepreneurship is a calling, not a job.

Technical Review 334

Technical Review Entrepreneur Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

Employees had a different concern – they simply wanted more clarity on how to continue to be involved, since formal rules of engagement ended with the bootcamp. We should have asked for a broader innovation time off and incentive policy for employees, managers, and executives. We needed a for a Proof of Concept center.

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2020

Sheltering in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, my coffees with current and ex-students (entrepreneurs, as well as employees early in their careers) have gone virtual. Pre-pandemic these coffees were usually about what startup to join or how to find product/market fit.

Software Review 434

Software Review Technical Review eCommerce Salary 434

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Entrepreneurial employees are the talented performers who hear the siren song of a founder’s vision. Both founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer to build something from the ground up rather than join an existing company. Founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer operating in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2017

When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. I wasn’t surprised.

Startup 310

Startup PR Public Relations Channel 310

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company. If you’re not a founder (by choice, timing or temperament,) you may be an early employee or a later stage startup employee. If you’re unsure, you’ve just decided.)

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

(It helps if the acquirer has incentives for its existing employees that tie the new acquisition’s success to those that help them.)

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Steve Blank

MARCH 16, 2016

Above all, don’t panic or demoralize your employees. It’s detrimental to tell your employees who have bought into the vision, mission and excitement of a startup to know that it’s for sale the day you start it. You need at least a 5x return to generate rewards for investors and employee stock options.

Liquidity Event 120

Liquidity Event Founder Liquidation Preference Venture Capital 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

Some companies use a suggestion box, others like Google give employees 20% of their time to work on their own projects. And to keep executing large organizations hire employees with a range of skills and competencies. To manage these employees companies create metrics to control, measure and reward execution.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 325

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2019

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up.

Employee 261

Employee Video Founder Startup 261

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

Large companies are sending employees to work at home. If you’re running a startup or small business, your first priority (after your family) is keeping your employees and customers safe. Large retail chains are shutting down their stores. But next the question is, ‘What happens to my business?”. You need to act now.

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Steve Blank

JUNE 27, 2017

Its employees and investors don’t depend on an existing revenue stream. One of the unheralded advantages of a startup is what at first glance appears to be its weakness. Initially, a startup has no business model and no market share to defend.

Startup 275

Startup New York City Valuation Distribution 275

Steve Blank

JULY 14, 2020

Remote Daily – Simplified employee feedback for small businesses. MatchBook – Hiring platform structured similarly to dating apps. MemLove – Helping people grieve for lost loved ones. MUSTA – Telemedicine platform for patients in the Philippines. Resilience Gym – Online education and virtual reality to enhance mental health.

Peru 291

Peru Philippines Mobile Global 291

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

Resources may be CRO’s, CPT consultants, IP, Financial or Human resources (regardless of whether they’re consultants or employees.). The answer is what goes in the R esources box (and if necessary, the Partners box.) Partners are external resources necessary to execute the Activities.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2019

VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. For most startup employee’s startup stock options are now a bad deal. As Venture Capital emerged as an industry in the mid 1970’s, investors in venture-funded startups began to give stock options to all their employees. Here’s why.

Stock Options 333

Stock Options Stock Vesting Common Stock 333

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2016

Actually startup would be a misnomer as Rahul had built a great company, now over $50M in annual revenue with hundreds of employees. It was all impressive – until we got on the subject of how hard his employees worked. Then after another 10-minute pause, a stream of employees poured out of the building like ants emptying the nest.

Metrics 220

Metrics Employee Revenue Matching 220

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

You find early stage employees expecting to work normal hours, to get paid a regular salary, and not asking or expecting equity. There’s a safety net in almost every part of one’s public and private life – health insurance, free college tuition, unions, collective bargaining, fixed work hours, etc.

Finland 324

Finland Naming Russia Government 324

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

In the first 4 weeks, our team got out of the building and spoke with employees at 42 different companies. After all, there must be a huge number of researchers struggling with the exact same problems we had, right? Not quite…. Out of the Building.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Often the short-term cuts directly affect employee salaries, jobs, and long-term investment in R&D. The bad news is once they take control of a company, long-term investment is not the goal of an activist investor. They often kill any long-term strategic initiatives. The first things to go are R&D centers and innovation initiatives.

Institutional Investors 233

Institutional Investors Dividend Stock Technical Review 233

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

At Tekes, government employees (and their hired consultants) – with no equity, no risk or reward, no startup or venture capital experience – try to pick startup winners and losers. It’s hard enough to pick which existing companies with known business models to aid.

Finland 324

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 324

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2018

Companies: In the 20 th century when companies competed with peers with the same business model, they wanted employees to help them execute current business models (whether it was working on an assembly line or writing code supporting or extending current products).

Entrepreneur 336

Entrepreneur Business Model Capital Gains Aggregator 336

Steve Blank

APRIL 1, 2020

Nothing is more important than assuring the company can continue to pay its employees. Award equity to employees equal to the value of their reduced salaries. Try to protect the most vulnerable employees. Your employees likely have ideas and see opportunities not visible in the C-suite. Cut CXO salaries by at least 30%.

South Korea 333

South Korea Salary Business Model China 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Turnover of employees in capital in Beijing is very high. Employees work here for a few months and are suddenly gone. Startup teams feel like they are 2-5x the size of American teams. There seems to be little appreciation or interest in multi-skilled people. There’s a noticeable lack of tenacity in young, new entrepreneurs.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

I had acted like an employee, not as a founder and certainly not as the CEO of a startup. That requires you to identify opportunities and seize the day. Opportunities are not just about sales, marketing or product. In this case it was about a resource I had in my hands and let go of. And I didn’t stand up for what I had believed in.

Advisory Board 260

Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 260

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

With fewer than 10 employees but almost $2-billion dollars in the bank, they plan on jumping right in. (Given Verizon just shut down Go90 , its short form content video service, it will be interesting to see if Verizon distributes Katzenberg’s offerings.). But NewTV doesn’t plan on testing these hypotheses. And it may work.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Firms first generate new ideas via ideation: the last twenty years have seen an explosion of corporate venture capital, open innovation, and employee involvement via hackathons and incubators. To be truly successful at ambidexterity firms must master the new skills of ideation, incubation, and scaling.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

But now, as the business model is repeatable and scalable, most employees take the business model as a given, and instead focus on the execution of the model – what is it they are supposed to do every day when they come to work. Somewhere in the dim past of the company, it too was a startup searching for a business model.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2016

Actually startup would be a misnomer as Rahul had built a great company, now over $50M in annual revenue with hundreds of employees. It was all impressive – until we got on the subject of how hard his employees worked. Then after another 10-minute pause, a stream of employees poured out of the building like ants emptying the nest.

Metrics 120

Metrics Employee Revenue Matching 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

By the time I was running a company, having some junior employee tell me why they couldn’t do something because of “how hard it was” didn’t get much sympathy from me. When I finally became a CEO it was after I had spent my career working my way up the ladder in marketing in startups. I knew how hard it was because I had done it myself.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Early Stage Technical Review Startup 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Turnover of employees in capital in Beijing is very high. Employees work here for a few months and are suddenly gone. Startup teams feel like they are 2-5x the size of American teams. There seems to be little appreciation or interest in multi-skilled people. There’s a noticeable lack of tenacity in young, new entrepreneurs.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2020

Focus our scarce testing tools first on nursing homes and their employees and front line medical workers, next to everyone over 60, then those whose illness puts them at risk and then to the general population. Provide this protected population with full health care.

South Korea 436

South Korea Italy Spain China 436