Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing. This sentence is worth reading multiple times as no one – not the person who hired you, the VC’s or your peers -is going to tell you when you’re hired that the company will likely outgrow you. Your original hires embody the company culture. I was devastated.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Steve Blank

AUGUST 22, 2011

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten involved in hiring for two startups, a public agency and a non profit. In the last week I had four separate groups through the ranch all wanting to talk either about hiring a senior exec or a senior exec looking for a new job. Founders search, operating executives execute. Draw a pie chart.

Hiring 290

Hiring Non-Compete Search Customer Development 290

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. He just hired Meg Whitman. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. The result?

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

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 hired everyone according to our plan. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. “What’s gone and what’s past help. Should be past grief.” So here’s mine.

Redemption 330

Redemption Cofounder Silicon Valley Burn Rate 330

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. Hire a CEO to Go Public. A pre-IPO board usually had two founders, two VCs and one “independent” member.

Founder 245

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Steve Blank

MAY 20, 2010

This partner lived up to his reputation and helped us hire an experienced, world-class CEO from a large consulting company that we thought would be the guy to take our company to a billion dollars (think Internet-bubble Kool-aid.). You’re Just the Founders. You’re just the founders.” Founder-friendly VCs” do exist.

Founder 275

Founder Cofounder Salary Naming 275

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

Early-stage Venture Capital firms grow their partnerships in different ways, some hire: partners from other firms. an executive who had startup “operating experience” rarely a startup founder/CEO. because culture is such an important part of who we are, we will probably never hire a partner from another firm.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Early Stage Technical Review Startup 332

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. it is an art) and again hired professionals.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

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 hired everyone according to our plan. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. “What’s gone and what’s past help. Should be past grief.” So here’s mine.

Redemption 222

Redemption Cofounder Silicon Valley Burn Rate 222

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

MAY 19, 2015

While he kept bringing the conversation back to their big valuation I tried to steer the conversation back to how they were going to deal with: training the influx of new hires – in both culture and job specific tasks. retaining their existing hires who were working for intern-like salaries with little equity.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

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

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Instead the business press dumped on the founders for “selling out.” Many founders mentioned this as a reason not to incorporate or grow their companies in Finland. They’ve stopped hiring the best talent, and startups are not looking so risky compared to large companies. Nokia was blind-sided in a classic disruptive innovation.

Finland 324

Finland Naming Russia Government 324

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

In response, venture capital firms like Sequoia and Andreessen/Horowitz are hiring new partners just to work with their portfolio companies and match them to corporations. 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

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.) So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

I learned that the founders received their initial product orders from their friends in the industry and through board members personal connections. Cash was flowing out of the company and the VP of Sales was still hiring. Scale sales and marketing after the founders and a small team have found a repeatable sales model.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He

Advisory Board 260

Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 260

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

SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

Anand Sanwal , co-founder and CEO of CB Insights ; and Chris Shipley , executive producer of MIT’s Solve initiative, joined me in the studio to discuss the day-to-day chaos of building a company. Among these was the realization that a formal onboarding process for new hires is critical. You hire really smart people-.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder Channel 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 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

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

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. I chose to hire engineers from within each of our target markets and set up “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.” These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2019

In tech startups stock options were here almost from the beginning, first offered to the founders in 1957 at Fairchild Semiconductor , the first chip startup in Silicon Valley. The investors were giving away part of their ownership of the company — not just to the founders, but to all employees. Here’s why.

Stock Options 333

Stock Options Stock Vesting Common Stock 333

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They thought about it for a moment and said, “Well we feel like we understand how to build things, but sales is something we thought we’d hire an expert to do.”. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 314

PR China Lean Channel 314

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

Unlike corporate executives, founders are closer to artists than executives – they see things others don’t, and they spend their careers passionately trying to bring that vision to life. Therefore, for founders, entrepreneurship wasn’t a job, but a calling. Teaching a different kind of innovator.

Lean 428

Lean Business Model Government Agile 428

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2018

They are talking about everyone who chooses to be self-employed – from a corner food vendor without a high school diploma to a high-tech founder with a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford.). There was little loss when they missed hiring employees who had entrepreneurial skills. They found: Signaling. Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneur 336

Entrepreneur Business Model Capital Gains Aggregator 336

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

If you’ve tried to slog your way through my book on Customer Development you know that I’m insistent that the founders need to be the ones getting outside the building (physically or virtually) to validate all the initial hypotheses of the business model and product. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

And to keep executing large organizations hire employees with a range of skills and competencies. If they don’t, then the management team has simply become caretakers of the founders’ legacy. And secondly, their sole purpose is to focus resources on the executionof their business model. This never ends well.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 325

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

I just had lunch (at my favorite Greek restaurant in Palo Alto forgetting it looked like a VC meetup) with a friend who was technical founder of his company and is now its chairman. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. It Seems Logical.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They thought about it for a moment and said, “Well we feel like we understand how to build things, but sales is something we thought we’d hire an expert to do.”. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 206

PR China Lean Channel 206

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Blame it On Marketing In the next 3-6 months, a new VP of Sales is hired. Moreover, since the first CEO was likely to have been one of the founders, the trauma of CEO removal begins. The rest of the organization (product development, marketing, support) has been burning cash, all according to plan, expecting Sales to make its numbers.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

JUNE 16, 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. David Comisford , founder and CEO of EduSourced. Omar Zenhom , co-founder of The $100 MBA. Go hire a sales exec to scale? David Comisford. Omar Zenhom.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Ohio 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 21, 2009

We Hired the CFO. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams.

Engineer 335

Engineer Valuation Hiring Stock 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The question was: what did the founders want to do? Will Harvey , Eric Ries and the other founders were unequivocal – “Screw the buy-out, we’re here to build a company. One founder quit and joined Google.) Go For Broke. The Scalable Startup.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Yet this same network of connected people affects who gets funded, how startup teams form, and who gets hired. . The show follows the journeys of founders sharing their experiences of what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Dave Kashen. We had this mission.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

The first thing that I noticed was that Bob couldn’t seem to find a co-founder. Bob started hiring second rate developers. Bob had gotten to a place most founders never do – his product was a “gotta have it for people with big budgets.” But I hired guys who were cheap because I wasn’t sure if my hypotheses were right.

Customer Development 330

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 330