Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2018

I’ve been thinking why the ethical boundaries of todays founder/VC interactions feel so different then they did when I was an entrepreneur. I’ve written about the root causes in an HBR article here and an expanded version here. Worth a read. If you can’t see the video click here.

Founder 269

Founder Video Entrepreneur 269

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

Kauffman just launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. After weeks honing the script and days of filming, I’m honored to present the “ Startups ” section of Founders School.

Founder 327

Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. Some of the engineers figuring if the founder was declaring they were toast in 90 days were updating their resumes. Yuri, one of the things that you make you a great founder is that you have insight others don’t. A Pivot a Week. he’d declare.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2017

Before the rapid rise of Unicorns, (startups with a valuation over a billion dollars), when boards were still in control, they “encouraged” the hiring of “adult supervision” of the founders after they found product/market fit. The founders. Founders are comfortable in the chaos and disorder. And they were right. Wakeup Call.

Part-Time VPE 308

Part-Time VPE Liquidity Event Stock Engineer 308

Steve Blank

MAY 20, 2010

My co-founder and I gulped as we went through each part of the package; the equity we ere offering would make him an equal founder, and his salary, while a huge cut for him was a lot more than the starvation budget we had put ourselves on. You’re Just the Founders. You’re just the founders.” We thought he’d be worth it.

Founder 275

Founder Cofounder Salary Naming 275

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 27, 2015

—– In a recent workshop with a large company focused on the Innovation@50x process, I mentioned that founders and intraprenuers operate more like artists than accountants – on day one they see something no one else does. I wondered what lessons Pixar, an animation studio, could have for founders. Like a startup founder.)

Founder 120

Founder Lean Hawaii Incubator 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

Why do these founders get to stay around? Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders. VCs competing for unicorn investments have given founders control of the board. A pre-IPO board usually had two founders, two VCs and one “independent” member. Technology Cycles Measured in Years.

Founder 245

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? How many of their founders are still with their company? How many of their founders are still with their company? Will they tailor your vesting to your contribution as a founder?

Founder 231

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Steve Blank

APRIL 8, 2011

The team at True Ventures was kind enough to invite me to speak at their Founders Camp. They pull in the founders of all their startups for 24 hours of activities, speakers, and discussions. I was blown away by the raw talent of these teams. They had someone translating my words into a diagram as I spoke.

Founder 231

Founder Venture Capital Startup 231

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2018

With the reckless and naïve abandon of founders who had no clue what they were about to tackle, we had just started Ardent , a supercomputer company. Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Engineering (one of my mentors and then co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. Here was the day I got that lesson.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Leadership Silicon Valley Los Angeles 321

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

If you’re following Tesla, you might be interested to know that Sloan wasn’t the founder of GM. Where are the charitable foundations, business schools, and hospitals named after the founder of GM? The founder of what became General Motors was William (Billy) Durant. And a founder of Neuralink a brain-computer interface startup.

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2010

But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Customer Development is designed so that you the founder(s) gather first hand experience about customer and market needs. Founders get out of the building (physically or virtually) to test their hypotheses against reality.

Founder 199

Founder Cofounder Business Model Customer Development 199

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

It’s the antithesis of how founders want to build a business. And they are all very different from the business-to-consumer or business-to-business markets most founders and their investors are familiar with. (You can watch Bill’s entire 24-minute talk here or his thesis summarized in this 7 second clip here.

Washington 271

Washington Government Marketing Silicon Valley 271

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. ” Fire, Ready, Aim. He just hired Meg Whitman. The result?

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 23, 2023

If you find an A-player CIA officer jumping into a founder role mid-way in their career (or decide to start something yourself,) they’ll probably go on to do great things. Achievement-focused and good storytellers, they know how to figure things out, “read the room,” and assess and mitigate risk.

Government 212

Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 212

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. A Day in the Life of A Founder For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.

Founder 297

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Founders fit the definition of a creator: they see something no one else does. This concept of creating something that few others see – and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it – is at the heart of what startup founders do. Lessons Learned. These type of people are rare, unique and crazy.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

For the second startup, we chose a year-old web/mobile startup whose market is college bound teens, with a founder who had skipped the initial customer validation process. Knowing they had 3 weeks before presenting to the company co-founders, the kids felt intensity like no traditional classroom could generate.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2018

These are entrepreneurial skills you need to rapidly acquire or find a co-founder who already has them. It does mean that success in building a company that scales depends on finding product/market fit, enough customers, enough financing, enough great employees, distribution channels, etc. Lessons Learned.

Technical Review 334

Technical Review Entrepreneur Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2015

While some venture firms have been around for awhile, perhaps the newer partners have a different model of what a successful founder looks like than their west coast peers. Those bemoaning the dearth of women founders in Silicon Valley might want to see if there is a real disparity between the coasts or if it is just my selection bias?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley New York City New York Venture Capital 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

Some (like your peers or even the founders) don’t understand it, and others (the VCs) realize it’s not in their interest to let you know. Declare them cultural co-founders. VC’s, Founders and CEOs now recognize that startups grow through different stages: Search, Build and Grow. Your original hires embody the company culture.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. “What’s gone and what’s past help. Should be past grief.” ” William Shakespeare - The Winter’s Tale. So here’s mine.

Redemption 330

Redemption Cofounder Silicon Valley Burn Rate 330

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2013

And you and your cofounders need to have that discussion to make sure that all the co-founders’ interests are aligned – before you make any decision to start the company. Founders don’t do startups because they’re searching for a huge financial windfall. See 4:36 in the video below). Most of the time you will fail.

Cofounder 325

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Liquidity Event Lean 325

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

I’ve spent more than four decades founding, coaching, teaching and investing in startups, and nothing breaks my heart more than meeting a starry-eyed founder who says “we’re almost ready to show it to people.” The “it” is a physical or web product they’ve often been locked-down, pounding away at, for many weeks.

Startup 332

Startup Cofounder Customer Development Viral 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

What gets lost when a large company looks at the rationale for an acquisition (IP, team, product, users) is that startups are run by founders searching for a business model. And as part of their transition to predictable processes, their founders may or may not still be at the helm. Predicting Success or Failure of an Acquisition.

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite if you don’t have any. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Clay Hebert.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Successful founders have a laser-like focus and commitment; a keen understanding of customers’ needs; and a tenacious spirit, said the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. Steve : … Team captain is a lot like the founder and CEO of a startup. Reetu Gupta. Mandela Schumacher-Hodge.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder India Entrepreneur Maryland 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Finally, when everyone else had their turn, the grey-haired VC turned to the founder and said, “If you do what we tell you to do and fail, we’ll fire you. In contrast, in a startup following the Customer Development process, this is when the founders realize that something is wrong with the business model (because revenue is not scaling.)

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

Steve Blank

MAY 27, 2010

But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. The issues our lawyer had raised about the contract, while correct, were strategy questions the founders needed to answer, not legal questions. My co-founder and a few board members brainstormed to make sure we weren’t missing anything.

CTO Hire 287

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Software Review Startup 287

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. “What’s gone and what’s past help. Should be past grief.” ” William Shakespeare - The Winter’s Tale. So here’s mine.

Redemption 222

Redemption Cofounder Silicon Valley Burn Rate 222

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

No newly hired sales and marketing exec is going to tell a founder, “Hey my prior experience and assumptions may not actually be relevant to this new startup.” The Outsourcing of Founders Responsibility The Product Development model separates founders from deeply understanding their customers and market.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238