VC Cafe

MAY 23, 2023

More and more, established companies are leaning into generative AI by either adding generative AI features to their existing suite of tools or partnering with AI companies (mostly OpenAI or the open source HuggingFace) to launch entirely new products. There’s an interesting thing happening in the generative AI world.

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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. 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

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? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Time to Market – How long?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

The lean start-up movement has been based on a single insight – which the purpose of a start-up is to discover a business model that works. In this article we explore the unique challenges of a lean start-up and how Outsourced Product Development (OPD) can be used to overcome them. The Lean Start-Up Environment.

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The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. What’s more it also required a large team of smart engineers that had experience in programming cross-platform software. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean. Staying lean early on will help you when you need to scale.”.

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Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

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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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

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.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Except it does it without relying on organic search engine optimization to make an impact. And the more of them your website has, the higher it will rank in search engines, giving you more traffic. For your advertising spend, you’re getting paid benefits and a boost to your search engine marketing campaigns.

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Advertising Cost Customer PR 131

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

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Ed Baker of Friend.ly , a fun way to meet new people, is focused on driving innovation: Encourage more product suggestions from our engineering team. Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas. Improve the product. Internalize culture and values.

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Stealth Startup Lean Cofounder 60

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. If they don’t, there are a new breed of lean startups who understand this deep in the bones ready to take their place. 12comments: Dougvs said.

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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.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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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.

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ConversionXL

JUNE 30, 2019

The lean, aggressive ones do. What I’m looking for are common trends within that vertical. You may find that adding regular competitive analyses to your CRO process and adapting your strategy based on that analysis will fuel your creative engine and positively impact conversions. reviews, trust).

SEO 126

SEO Conversion Analytics Design 126

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

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

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

ConversionXL

MAY 11, 2017

The lean, aggressive ones do. What I am looking for is common trends within that vertical. You may find that adding regular competitive analysis to your CRO process and adapting your strategy based on that analysis, will fuel your creative engine and positively impact conversions.

SEO 131

SEO Analytics Conversion Search 131

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

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. I found that having a senior marketer responsible for business strategy surrounded by ex-engineers and domain experts makes one heck of a powerful marketing department.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Four years later Ayer and another Granger engineer would leave Granger and found one of the preeminent electronic warfare and ELINT companies: Applied Technologies. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

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? Filed under: Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. This post is part five. Parts one through four are here , Syllabus is here. . Week 5 of the class. Stay tuned.

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Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 247

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Lean marketing. Still, it’s become one of our most profitable acquisition channels, and more importantly an excellent way to test new customer verticals and target markets. It relates to content shares, brand awareness, and even position in search engines, so measuring CAC here can be a whole different challenge.

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. Growth hacking is a term that emerged from the Silicon Valley tech community and the lean startup methodology. Reverse engineer what already works and run experiments over the long-term. Search engine marketing: Driving ROI from searchers.

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Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

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

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I am also a pilot, and computer engineer, and love to read stories about sigint and black aircraft programs. Besides it being harder to get funding, it seems like this would be a good time to get cheap labor, rent, and product. Also, it would be nice to do something that helps this country (but not solely for that reason).

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 170

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.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

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.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

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. This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability.

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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 153

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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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278