Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

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ConversionXL

MAY 11, 2017

The lean, aggressive ones do. Having this information about your competitor will give you a strong edge. What I am looking for is common trends within that vertical. Reviewing a competitor’s online presence helps me understand how to differentiate my client. Please explain why you have chosen [number].

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.” Taking the information gleaned from our ELINT aircraft, Stanford built prototypes of jammers modulated with two new deception jamming techniques – angle jamming and range-gate pull-off. and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons at this point.)

Silicon Valley 142

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. They were engineers, certainly they could do better than that? Or were they 2) an information exchange, providing matching services for cloud computing buyers and sellers, providing matching services. This post is part five.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What plan says that?

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. Growth marketers can then use audience segmentation and multivariate testing to understand what resonates best with different sub-segments, informing more personalized communication. Reverse engineer what already works and run experiments over the long-term.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. Combined with product costs, an engineering budget, and schedules, this results in a spreadsheet that faintly resembles the first financial plan in the company’s business plan.

Silicon Valley 260

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 420

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

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. In no literature I read, I can find information about the “stop signs&# in CD. I could use just gut feeling.

Customer Development 242

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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. Stay hungry, stay lean.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

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crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Google’s USP might be in the way they connect people with information, whereas Amazon’s might be providing whatever product you need quickly, efficiently, and at as low a cost as possible. What information do you need to create personas? Figuring out what your USP is can take time, but it’s a crucial piece of your brand.

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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

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

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Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel.

Part-Time VPE 54

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. the type of training military maintenance people need, and I had done some informal teaching in the Air Force. I was always kind of curious.

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David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I use Feedly to track information about the companies and industries I am tracking, and share that information internally. I use Superhuman , an email app which speeds up my email processing, and also gives me background information on all of my correspondents. ff Venture Capital hired two full-time engineers to build out Totem.

Technical Review 78

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. You need to store two kinds of information. This information is normally maintained by your operations team. This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases. Key-based partitioning. to store it.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

As I talked to the head of training and his boss, I pointed out that the clock was ticking down for them, I knew the type of training military maintenance people need , and I had done some informal teaching in the Air Force. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. It would be great to know how they got news and information about new products and new companies. Which ones?

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mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

Dividing long content into multiple pages makes information harder to reach. If designers choose extra pages over long layouts, then conventional structures make information harder to reach. Traditionally “content” is the information that a website contains. Proximity Does the information’s geography matter?

Mobile 101

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. We were combining Stanford Engineering theory with ESL design engineers and implementing it with chips so new we were debugging the silicon as we were debugging the entire system. Taking concepts that had been only abstract Ph.D

Silicon Valley 270

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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. The information we collected would be passed on to defense contractors who would build the jammers to confuse the Soviet air defense radars. Much more was to come.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Simulation applications After six months, we hypothesized that our most likely customers were scientists and engineers who used one of five applications: computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and seismic data processing and reservoir simulation. Their interest was easy to understand.

Silicon Valley 136

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. Instead of eight boards, Engineering was going to be able to deliver one new graphics board. One of the reasons I had joined the company was seeing these boards as hope for the future. What could we do?

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

If you are an entrepreneur seeking funding, try our free Funding Recommendation Engine to identify a list of angels, venture capital and state grant programs that best match your business. Hiring is hard, and without proper experience, we should have leaned more heavily on our investors to help us with this decision. It’s free.

Software Review 79

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Arm them with as much information and support as possible. But sales came first. (By Educate them. Make it so they can’t fail.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. on June 19, 2009 at 9:47 am Said: This is one of the best personal blog information I read in a long time. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Thank you Reply Michael F.

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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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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

It gets up and running fast with simple pricing, minimal engineering effort, and global document coverage. They’re also pushing to enrich this identity data with information relevant to anti-money laundering compliance, social accounts, and even background checks. What has the startup experience taught you about life? Hard question.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cofounder New York Software Review 62

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

I currently work in information security, and I help teach developers how to write better, more secure code. I am the VP of Engineering at a cutting-edge startup that sells software built on the.NET platform. It’s like arguing against vertical software. It’s also missing the point of engineering anything.

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Up and Running

OCTOBER 31, 2017

When it comes to achievement, my philosophy is to look to the people who’ve already landed what I want and reverse-engineer what they’ve done. Known as the father of financial freedom, Robert Kiyosaki has educated, informed, and inspired millions of people around the world by empowering them with financial knowledge.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

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Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

The post outlines eight sources vendors use to collect data: Toolbars, panels, ISP data, search engines, self reported, scraped/indexed, hybrid, and external voc. I find this behavior to be a million times more useful than demographics or political leanings. What categories of content do they consume? And trust me, you will need it.

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