Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. The implications for entrepreneurs is that each of these (market risk versus invention risk,) require radically different financing models, a different type of venture investor, different timing for hiring sales and marketing, etc.

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YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 29, 2011

Entrepreneur Finder ( www.EntrepreneurFinder.com ) is a free interactive resource for entrepreneurs, skilled professionals, students and investors to find each other and designed to help startup companies grow. A startup looking for investment, mentorship, or specific talent to help grow your company? The Beginning.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” I learned a lot at Convergent, going from product marketing manager in a small startup to VP of Marketing of the Unix Division as it became a public company.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. I realized the Customer Development model needs to be clearer in what exactly a startup is supposed to do, regardless of the business model.

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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.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Filed under: SuperMac | Tagged: Early Stage Startup , Steve Blank « There’s a Pattern Here SuperMac War Story 2: Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within – So Get the Hell Outside the Building » Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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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. Over time you start to figure out who you customers are and how to sell to them or how to get them to adopt your products if you’re a consumer-oriented startup. As You Start to Mature.

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. Watching others try to solve problems reminded me why entrepreneurs are different. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It took lots of trial and error, learning by experience and resilience through multiple failures.

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The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. Working for a startup is a unique experience and it’s not for everyone.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Only in Silicon Valley could we have got funded with this idea, and not surprisingly, it was our technology that had the VC’s confused. His point was that it was in the VC’s interest in having entrepreneurs swing for the fences. Or “I’ve seen a lot of movies so let’s start a movie studio.”

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. There’s lots of lore, emotion, and misconceptions of what VC’s do or don’t do for entrepreneurs. What Do VC’s Do? The reality is that VC’s have one goal – to maximize the amount of money they return to their investors.

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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.

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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? A version of this article appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

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Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

LexSet’s primary office is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard at the NewLab , an amazing startup ecosystem that provides lots of opportunities for pilots and collaborations. What has the startup experience taught you about life? If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17.

Technical Review 63

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But at times it’s why entrepreneurs can sink their own companies.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brendan McManus, [Startup Digest]. Startup Digest] said: Thanksgiving Day [link] [via @sgblank] [.] Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

I first met Evangelos Simoudis when he ran IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions Division and then as CEO of his first startup Customer Analytics. During the last three years he’s worked with over 100 companies, many of which established Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley.

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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. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. We were sitting in our cheap hotel room when the phone rang.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. what Market Type is your startup? Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. startups ignore the rest of the world until they scale in their own country.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

And while others in our new startup came from companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that had sold computers to automate scientific instrumentation and process control, the computers we were building at Ardent were targeted to different customers and markets. The problem was I didn’t have a clue.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 11, 2011

This week, I've had several meetings with venture funds, incubators, corporate accelerators and other significant players in the startup eco-system. One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals.

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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.

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