Steve Blank

article thumbnail

Even the Smartest VCs Sometimes Get it Wrong – Bill Gurley and Regulated Markets

Steve Blank

He illustrated his talk with regulatory horror stories in the telecom market , electronic health records , and Covid antigen tests. Unfortunately, for startups entering a regulated market following this advice this might not be the optimum path. But regulated markets are different. Regulation What’s regulatory capture?

article thumbnail

It Must Be A Marketing Problem

Steve Blank

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. It’s A Marketing Problem. We Have a Marketing Problem. “So

Burn Rate 248
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How to Stop Playing “Target Market Roulette”: A new addition to the Lean toolset

Steve Blank

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 333
article thumbnail

Corporate Acquisitions of Startups: Why Do They Fail?

Steve Blank

The Innovation Portfolio. Companies manage these three types of innovation with an innovation portfolio – they build innovation internally, they buy it or they partner with resources outside their company. The founding team is testing for the right combination of product, market, revenue, costs, etc.

article thumbnail

Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

Vertical 144
article thumbnail

Why a Company Can’t “Be More Like a Startup”

Steve Blank

Initially, a startup has no business model and no market share to defend. But often the legal obstacles confronting startups have been put in place by companies that look to the government and regulators as their first line of defense against new market entrants. Startups can do anything. to stifle competition.).

article thumbnail

Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

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. ” Fire, Ready, Aim. IPOs dried up.

Lean 335