Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

You think startups are hard? The idea of exploitation versus exploration was central in my own work in building the lean methodology for start-ups. Today, lean is the de facto method for building new start-ups. Recognizing the need for ambidexterity and building an ambidextrous organization are tests of corporate leadership.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

Guest post by Lean Startup Co. This October marks the 10th anniversary of the Lean Startup Conference. Our team was deeply invested in the process and as Hisham Ibrahim , Senior Faculty at Lean Startup Co. Our team was deeply invested in the process and as Hisham Ibrahim , Senior Faculty at Lean Startup Co.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2017

Guest Post by Misti Yang, Writer for Lean Startup Co. Editor’s Note: We wrapped up the 2017 Lean Startup Week in San Francisco just a few weeks ago, and we’re excited to share with you some of the best lessons learned in entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. Remember your customers, culture, and connections.

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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. Union Square Ventures The next morning I got to spend time with Brad Burnham , partner at Union Square Ventures talking about their investment strategy and insights about web-based businesses.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

how on Earth could the venture capital market stand still? One of the most common questions I’m asked by people intrigued by but also scared by venture capital and technology markets is some variant of, “Aren’t technology markets way overvalued? With the enormous changes to our economies and financial markets?—?how

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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

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover , iterate and execute. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Startups in Bend.

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Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Yet two smart VC firms, Sigma and Matrix Partners, realized that somewhere in this mess there was value. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

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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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

(Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership.

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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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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 11, 2012

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Lean Marketing: Delivering Customer Service via Social Media – [link]. Tips for small business (and startups): Negotiating With the New Recruit – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

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. Lets see why.

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Now In Print!

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 25, 2018

by Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman, authors of “ Straight Talk for Startups: 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds “ From the outside, the startup world appears flush with opportunities. New companies are formed daily, raising huge sums of venture capital to take on the incumbents and put your company out of business.

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crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 30, 2012

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Small Business and Startups: 5 DIY Things To Do For Your Brand! How To Choose A Market For Your Startup Or Small Business – [link]. crowdSPRING Blog – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Central African Republic Design 100

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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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2019

Lean LaunchPad class developed for Stanford. And the Lean LaunchPad class I developed at Stanford was the first such class. And the odds of learning from faculty who actually had experienced the chaos and uncertainty of building a startup was low. Worth a read. Teaching basic entrepreneurial appreciation. It’s a big idea.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Back in the 1960’s and 70’s no sane MBA’s would work for a Silicon Valley startup.) While MBA’s have a ton of useful skills, what they don’t have is what most marketing departments lack – customer insight.

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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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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

” As the managing editor of Bplans, I’ve had the good fortune to learn about business via the content we share; through interviews with LivePlan customers and other business owners; and thanks to brilliant, informal coaching from people like Tim Berry, Noah Parsons, and the rest of the executive leadership team at Palo Alto Software.

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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

MAY 12, 2015

After seeing the results of 500+ teams through the I-Corps, the NSF now offers all teams who’ve received government funding to start a company an introduction to building a Lean Startup. SBIR/STTR Program and Startup Seed Funding. startups that don’t fit whatever’s hot in venture capital.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

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

MAY 28, 2009

are much softer and much, much harder to measure (or believe) in a very early stage startup. We’ll talk about how to reduce risk in each type of market in the next post. It’s something VC’s can ask about, rationally analyze and feel comfortable if you can articulate a defensible technical and patent strategy.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

www.inc.com

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Leadership & Managing | Tuesdays. Advisor. ); STARTUP. LEADERSHIP & MANAGING. Leadership. Leadership and Managing >. Dave Graham Business Venture Capital Private Equity GlobalLogic Inc. Venture Capital Firms. But Ive definitely had to lean on Dave. Finance | Tuesdays. Newsletters.

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Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 15, 2013

Some are major contributors to their startup communities. As with everything new that grows quickly, it’s a chaotic system with lots of innovation, creative destruction, and rapid change and learning that – if done well – is a great example of the power of the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurship.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ).

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions. It reminded me of “earlier days&# , when I was just starting out in running business operations for startups. Now what was the strategy? What did I learn so far?

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Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 134

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I Stay out of startups. Just as an aside, over my career I must have interviewed scores of business school graduates (some from the very fine universities where I now teach) who would say, “I want to do strategy.” I just want to do strategy.”

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124