SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts&#. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why. Take a look at the chart below.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

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.

Silicon Valley 294

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 294

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods. Introducing Lean Planning: How to Plan Less and Grow Faster. How to Write a Traditional Business Plan.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) Product Development Diagram 1. release of the product.

Customer Development 243

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Looking forward for your future posts.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

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 129

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 129

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2015

And take what it learns and regularly update the corporate engineering, strategy, VC groups and business unit heads, on technology and market shifts. In Stage 2, the corporation adds venture capital and/or mergers-and-acquisition teams to provide these functions. Google just named the organization’s leader.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Incubator Acquisition Business Model 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

Transcript Automated transcription services provided by: Dan Bowen: My name is Dan Bowen, and I’m up in the wine country in Healdsburg, California north of San Francisco, and the company name is SyncBloc, S-Y-N-C-B-L-O-C. And that’s what your name is. of companies should never raise venture capital.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. . Pro Publica has a Nonprofit Explorer database searchable by principal name on all nonprofit filings, so you can see a person’s nonprofit activities. . Fincura specializes in serving lenders.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. 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.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

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. However the U.S.

Silicon Valley 282

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Venture Capital Cafe > Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Part 3- Lean Cust. Add a class name to buttons, forms, quotes, etc. Firebase : Are all your developers front-end engineers? Google Custom Search Engine.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

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

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. mentor VCs, e.g., most VCs.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2011

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley San Francisco San Jose Venture Capital 335

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. Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.”

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 163

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 27, 2010

Contrast that with the fact that when I wanted to change the name of my course at Fordham from Innovation & the Entrepreneurial Mindset to Innovative Entrepreneurship, I was told that I had to go through a curriculum committee and it would take several semesters to make that happen after the course was reviewed again.

New York 132

New York CTO Hire Technical Review New York City 132

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

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 180

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

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 126

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 195

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.

Silicon Valley 190

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 190

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.) Deliverable for Jan 18 th : Find a name for your team.

Wiki 315

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 315

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. No kidding. Play spooky music here.

Silicon Valley 199

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 199

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 268

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Edwin: Correct, I fully agree and the name MeetingKing already says that my initial focus definitely was on meetings, right? So if I’m looking, MeetingKing’s obviously a brilliant name. But we’re just not going to name them as ideal. It’s kind of already obvious what it does, which is great.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Altgate

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

The presentation was on outsourcing generally, not just software engineering and the audience was very early stage companies (some yet to be founded). When outsourcing, remember that lawyers are like VCs…it matters less who’s name is on the front door than who you work with. Engineering/QA. Bookmark the permalink.

Software Review 65

Software Review Offshore Startup Boston 65

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 206

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. All with names, addresses, phone numbers, job titles; all wonderful data longing for human contact. This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

genylabs.typepad.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Even the best venture capital firms have a lot of failures and few successes. Posted by: Atlanta Search Engine Optimization | April 16, 2008 at 07:38 AM. Name and email address are required. Name is required to post a comment. Wall Street Journal: With New Technology, Start-Ups Go Lean. venture capital.

Equity 40

Equity Technical Review San Jose Stock 40

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 23, 2015

Brian grew up locally and after he was graduated from Stanford (engineering) and Stanford MBA he went to work at a firm called Palomar Ventures. Rick was a partner there having previously been a Managing Director and founding member of Sun America’s venture capital practice and having been graduated from Harvard Law School.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Cofounder Early Stage 150

abovethecrowd.com

JANUARY 30, 2015

As we turn the page to 2015, Uber has a new BHAG, and it’s name is UberPool. Armed with this new data, Uber leaned on its legendary “math department” to help drive prices even lower. UberPool is a technically challenging pursuit that will require the highest level of execution and innovation from the engineering team at Uber.

Technical Review 40

Technical Review Algorithm San Francisco Demand 40

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.

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

Up and Running

AUGUST 12, 2015

You need to think of business planning from a lean perspective, and it’s just enough to get you to the right place. It is lean. Why do I talk about it as being a process, and lean. When Google came onto the market in ’99, ’00, there was already 15 other search engines. That is an old-school plan.

Forecast 60

Forecast Video Business Plan United States 60

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

If getting VC or angel money is one of the ways that will help you avoid failure, why not check out the free Funding Recommendation Engine here ? #20 Despite putting the company in an EXTREMELY lean position, generating revenue, and holding out as long as we could, we didn’t have the cash to keep going. Name (required).

Cofounder 89

Cofounder Startup Technical Cofounder CTO Hire 89

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. The startup develops its first positioning statement and uses this to explain the company and its benefits to venture capitalists. My pet name for the process is “Ortho.&#

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

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.

Silicon Valley 169

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 169