Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.) Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.) The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

We have done almost 90 roundtables so far and, based on this extensive experience of learning directly from entrepreneurs about their core issues, 1M/1M has just launched a new assessment tool for entrepreneurs. This strikes me as yet another entrepreneur who needs a tightening of his segmentation big time. Discuss.

Spain 115

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S. I was stunned.

Agile 245

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

The entrepreneur who founded and grew the largest startup in the world to $10 billion in revenue and got fired is someone you have probably never heard of. Who was the entrepreneur who founded what would become General Motors 16 years earlier, in 1904? But the spirit of Billy Durant would rise again in what would become Silicon Valley.

Michigan 268

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Version One Ventures

FEBRUARY 3, 2021

More creative and economic opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs. Then, Silicon Valley collectively deplatformed Trump (a scary precedent even if you vehemently dislike the guy). Let’s explore the status and implications of each vertical. . More inclusive models of stakeholder capitalism.

Web 193

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ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

I know that many, many entrepreneurs are feeling dejected because of investor rejections. I suggested going for larger companies and also to pick some verticals where the value proposition really shines through. In that case, the verticals of choice could be manufacturing, wholesale and retail. Discuss.

North Carolina 116

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

Taariq Lewis, the founder of Voluble, is a 1M/1M premium entrepreneur. We invited entrepreneurs considering joining the 1M/1M premium program to the Stanzr chat room and did a one-hour Q&A session. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant.

Entrepreneur 116

Entrepreneur San Francisco Technical Review New Jersey 116

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. in Entrepreneur, VC, decision making.

Silicon Valley 300

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. I offered to introduce him to the firm whose Entrepreneur-in-Residence offer I had just accepted.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. Fred Terman Sent Us In 1953 the U.S. The “customers’” contracts funded the company.

Silicon Valley 171

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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. The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title “the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley”. We were going to be guessing.

North Carolina 125

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. However, as hard as I emphasize this point to aspiring entrepreneurs every year I usually get a call or email from a past student asking me to introduce them to my favorite VC’s. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

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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.) Their engineers hated us. Engineers as Salesmen I thought (and still do) that this sales guy walked on water.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 release of the product. The products sold themselves.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. I looked around the room thinking I’d see the faces of the engineers in the ESL M-4 vault, but these were different people.

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

I am a young entrepreneur here, absolutely dying to hear the talk. And many of the best entrepreneurs experience failure a number of times before building a legendary business (thanks Steve Blank, you’re an info sharing rockstar). Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

And here’s an important point that I think modern entrepreneurs often forget: Investors are “co-owners” of your business. There are just as many bad entrepreneurs who do bad things. when to build out our offices in Silicon Valley, New York & Los Angeles. how to build an initial sales organization.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

During the last three years he’s worked with over 100 companies, many of which established Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley. He’s now helping companies get the most out of their relationships with Silicon Valley. By the 1950’s Shumpeter observed that in-house R&D had replaced the inventor-entrepreneur.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

This is the first of two posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– Building Blocks of Entrepreneurship By the mid 1950’s the groundwork for a culture and environment of entrepreneurship were taking shape on the east and west coasts of the United States.

Silicon Valley 159

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here.

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Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

The LexSet Co-Founders (left to right) CEO Francis Bitonti , President Leslie Oliver Karpas , and COO Azam Khan won $250,000 in Verizon’s Built on 5G Challenge The Forrest Four-Cast: March 3, 2020 LexSet serves AI engineers, especially those with limited resources, with a better way to annotate photos.

Technical Review 63

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 11, 2011

One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals. In many of these cases, the funds or the accelerators want to put in $100,000 to $500,000 in select ventures but are having a hard time finding mature entrepreneurs to support.

Silicon Valley 105

Silicon Valley Columbus Ohio Incubator 105

Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Fred Terman, encouraged scientists and engineers to set up companies to build these microwave tubes for the military. Funded by military contracts, these 1950′s microwave tube startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment.

Silicon Valley 155

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

Video 164

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

If you read only one previous post, read this one (or this one.) ————- The Birth of Entrepreneurship in The Hot Cold War Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was born in the middle of a secret war with the Soviet Union. While officially in the electrical engineering department, the lab reported directly to Terman.

Silicon Valley 153

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

Encouraged by their Dean, Fred Terman, scientists and engineers left Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory to set up companies to build microwave tubes and systems for the military. Funded by military contracts these 1950′s startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment.

Silicon Valley 144

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

For entrepreneurs good things come to those who ask. And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. Entreprenuers Know How to Ask Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to ask for things relentlessly.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– The First Valley IPO’s Silicon Valley first caught the eyes of east coast investors in the late 1950’s when the valleys first three IPO’s happened: Varian in 1956, Hewlett Packard in 1957, and Ampex in 1958.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley SBIC San Francisco RSS 125

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. We listed the editors, writers, what they had previously had written, deadlines, what the competitive products were, how our benchmarks stacked up, what “upgrades” our boards needed from engineering to win, etc.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 205

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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. Product Development – How do you engineer it? Others you need to know when you execute the plan.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Simulation to Reduce Invention Risk If you’re in a vertical where “invention risk” is dominant, then you want to do everything you can to manage and reduce those risks. When I wrote the Four Steps to the Epiphany , the Customer Development text, I hadn’t yet thought about what vertical markets it might be appropriate for.)

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