VC Cafe

MAY 30, 2024

An interesting new report by Dealroom and Flow Partners breaks down the massive investment that the “Magnificent Seven” (or M7 for short) are plowing into AI across verticals. Technology head start – Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic ? There are several reasons for this shift, and regulation plays a role here as well.

Technology 88

Technology Artificial Inteligence Generative AI Vertical 88

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. Markets with Invention Risk are those where it’s questionable whether the technology can ever be made to work – but if it does customers will beat a path to the company’s door.

Vertical 162

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 29, 2024

These absorbent underwear are designed to last up to eight hours using advanced technology similar to what astronauts wear. Install horizontal and vertical grab bars near the toilet, tub, or shower for maximum safety. Test the bars by leaning or pulling with total body weight to ensure stability.

Product 115

Product Security Technical Review Mobile 115

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21 st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. Problem – Lean Doesn’t Have a Market Definition Step.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

But have you ever had the opportunity to pick the brains of founders who created amazingly successful startups and companies like Envato , Backblaze , Simple , or Treehouse ? If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. Building a product like Wunderlist requires a large upfront investment into technology.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

When I met my now-wife, I realized that any technology that can find me a spouse is a killer app. I’d argue that the same type of technologies that have revolutionized dating can revolutionize our industry. . I walk through below how progressive investors are using technology and analytics throughout all of their operations.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

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. Convergent Technologies was one of those OEM suppliers. Their engineers hated us.

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

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.

Customer Development 232

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 232

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.

Silicon Valley 307

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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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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

VC Cafe

MAY 21, 2024

Although GenAI is a revolutionary technology, incumbents in the infrastructure domain are aggressively investing. Their scale and resources enable them to innovate rapidly, making it challenging for startups to compete directly in this space. Additionally, startups in this space face significant platform risk.

Generative AI 97

Generative AI ChatGPT Vertical B2B 97

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.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

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.

Engineer 221

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

VC Cafe

JANUARY 17, 2024

Both startups and large tech companies leaned in hard, incorporating automation tools and generative AI applications across verticals. Meta’s Make-A-Video builds on the recent progress made in text-to-image generation technology built to enable text-to-video generation. Visual generative AI made strides as well.

Generative AI 139

Generative AI Video Intellectual Property Artificial Inteligence 139

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. So what does an early-stage company do to avoid the doom and gloom plaguing the world of startups?

Early Stage 115

Early Stage Los Angeles Silicon Valley Cofounder 115

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

See the Passbase pitch in the category of Enterprise & Smart Data Technology , 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm Saturday, March 14, before a live audience and a panel of expert judges. I believe in decentralization, creative encryption, data sovereignty, and many of the principles that underpin blockchain technologies. Hard question.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cofounder New York Software Review 62

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 244

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

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.

Venture Capital 239

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 239

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

Vertical 137

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 137

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.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

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.

Silicon Valley 165

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 165

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.”

Customer Development 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Useful blogs and links for startups Click Here ————– 2.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Consider what followed since November: New foundational models, more efficient ways of training models etc An explosion of open source models, the rise of HuggingFace Breakthrough research across voice, video, text, multi modality, etc Billions of dollars invested in thousands of startups at the application layer of generative AI.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 78

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.

Cofounder 229

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

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!

Customer Development 128

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. Who would have known?

Silicon Valley 297

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 297

Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Just six months ago, VCs were publishing white papers extolling the virtue of non-bank lending startups, but now no one will touch them with a 10-foot pole. Vertical integration of different funding risks. Whatever happened to IoT after Nest? We make investments in years 1–3, we hope to make money back in years 7–10.

Harvest 60

Harvest Vertical IPO Early Stage 60

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. In a startup the role of Customer Development is to: test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem This is a big idea and worth repeating.

Customer Development 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

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. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.)

North Carolina 131

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 131

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. Each VC firm/partner has a different spin on what to weigh more.) 3) invest in and take equity stakes in exchange for capital.

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

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.

Silicon Valley 152

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

Silicon Valley 230

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 230

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.)

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Meanwhile our company was pouring an enormous amount of dollars into building tools and video compression technology, while also hiring a lot of high-priced Hollywood talent like art directors, and script and story editors. Successful pinball companies didn’t hire Hollywood talent.

Silicon Valley 222

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