Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

It wasn’t always perfect, but it was way more right than wrong, It informed our product development to a great degree and kept us working on more or less the right stuff. He reeled out that technical vision, described the product architecture in a way that computer science people found compelling and turned on the charm.

Technical Review 333

Technical Review Venture Capital Software Review Database 333

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I worked with engineering to try to find product/market fit ( big endian or little endian ?) The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing. They go from organizations struggling for survival as they search for product/market fit, to building a repeatable and scalable business model, and then growing to profitability.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Community 333

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. These new CEOs would also act as a brake to temper the founder’s excesses. And they were right.

Part-Time VPE 308

Part-Time VPE Liquidity Event Stock Engineer 308

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2018

At first the company just consisted of the founders, but Ben soon started to hire his engineering team. But as each engineer was hired and started work I began to notice that after a few days they started to wear suits… wait for it… with sneakers. And back then they were all men.) Keep their suit and sneaker style? The next day?

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Leadership Silicon Valley Los Angeles 321

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

“My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. Who’s the user of product? with a strategy.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

And when he’d get a positive response he’d show them his first minimal viable product – the mockup he had created of the User Interface in PowerPoint. But I’m having a hard time getting to my next minimal viable product. While I have all this great feedback on my visual mockups I can’t iterate my product.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder San Diego 336

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

And to today, when its major product is simply innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2019

Investors bet that by offering prospective hires a stake in the company’s future growth- with a visible time horizon of a payoff – employees would act more like owners and work harder– and that would align employee interests with the investor interests. That made sense.

Stock Options 333

Stock Options Stock Vesting Common Stock 333

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. He just hired Meg Whitman.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 1, 2020

Automated delivery services – the more people you can take out of the equation, the safer the product. Or to launch new products? Or if you have sufficient cash, now is the time to hire great people who were never available. When hiring began again, everyone was relieved: “The worst is over. Lessons Learned.

South Korea 333

South Korea Salary Business Model China 333

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

He also said, “The most important hire I made in my time at the JAIC was the chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani.” Nand changed the culture of the JAIC, bringing in Silicon Valley tools for product development, product management and for the first time a culture that focused on UI/UX, MVPs and continuous integration and deployment.

Artificial Inteligence 388

Artificial Inteligence Fractional CTO Technology CTO 388

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2017

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining. The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets.

Startup 310

Startup PR Public Relations Channel 310

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

Early-stage Venture Capital firms grow their partnerships in different ways, some hire: partners from other firms. because culture is such an important part of who we are, we will probably never hire a partner from another firm. Then take a year as a product manager in a startup in the firm’s portfolio. How to Become a VC.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Early Stage Technical Review Startup 332

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. 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.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

They hire local employees or family. They hire the best and the brightest. Most grow through sustaining innovation , offering new products that are variants around their core products. They are anyone who runs his/her own business. They work as hard as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Most are barely profitable.

Government 335

Government Silicon Valley Startup Venture Capital 335

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. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2023

Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Erin explained, “Customers love our product, and I think we’ve found product/market fit. I personally sold the first big deals and hired the VP of sales who’s building the sales team in our New York office. Where Are Your Biggest Business Deals? First, a new competitor started up. Lessons Learned.

New York 333

New York Miami Silicon Valley Sales 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

Most large companies manage three types of innovation: process innovation (making existing products incrementally better), continuous innovation (building on the strength of the company’s current business model but creating new elements) and disruptive innovation (creating products or services that did not exist before.).

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

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 set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. The phone call would sound something like: “We have a company with great technology and a hot product but at the last board meeting we determined that they have a marketing problem. No One is Buying Our Product.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2020

leading a multi-billion dollar business with a broad range of products and services supporting defense, homeland security, aerospace, infrastructure protection, and customers around the world. And we need to make sure we continually evolve that software, from development, to production to sustainment. it’s all a continuum.

Acquisition 284

Acquisition Technical Review Technology Security 284

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 Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. Is it possible to build?

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

In spite of this, private equity funds have used the rallying cry of efficiency to hijack corporate strategy and loot the profits that historically would have been reinvested into research and development and new products. Smart companies are always looking to make their current products better – and there are many ways to do this.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Business Model 325

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Who can I hire later? While most of the early attention in a startup is paid to finding product market fit ( the match between value proposition and customer segment on the right-side of the canvas) it’s the left side of the canvas that will tell you what your founding team should look like. And what can I outsource?”

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Wave after wave of hardware, software, biotech and cleantech products have emerged from what has become “ground zero” of entrepreneurial and startup culture. Compressing the Product Development Cycle. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

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

APRIL 11, 2013

The Torch program created Innovation Clusters by creating national Science and Technology Industrial Parks (STIPs), Software Parks, and Productivity Promotion Centers. It did so by building a national network of a 1,000+ Productivity Promotion Centers. It has become China’s Silicon Valley. Technology Business Incubators (TBIs).

Technical Review 278

Technical Review Programming SBIR China 278

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve gained as good of an insight into customer needs and product feature set than any startup I’ve seen. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

This 100+-year-old company has seven major product divisions, each with hundreds of products. To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on.

Framework 389

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 389

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2018

Entrepreneurs defer getting more formal education because they correctly expect their productivity will be higher than the market can infer from just their educational qualifications. The talented and more productive choose entrepreneurship. There was little loss when they missed hiring employees who had entrepreneurial skills.

Entrepreneur 336

Entrepreneur Business Model Capital Gains Aggregator 336

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. The board raises a collective eyebrow.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

We were the only folks with a product on the credit card space. That funded us. Among these was the realization that a formal onboarding process for new hires is critical. Anand : …We hire really high achieving people, and they felt that they weren’t achieving anything. You hire really smart people-.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder Channel 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&#

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. Where is the budget for purchasing the type of product you’re selling? Something else? Who’s the customer?

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

They are hard to do in a company that excels at products. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused. Visionary CEOs don’t need someone else to demo the company’s key products for them. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

They are hard to do in a company that excels at products. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused. Visionary CEOs don’t need someone else to demo the company’s key products for them. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120