Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

As we were out looking for our Series B round, our company had gotten the attention of “name of big VC firm here” who wanted a play in enterprise software. Never Get Even, Get Ahead With a set of orders from brand name customers, we had growing confidence that we had achieved product/market fit. Are These Your Slides?

Silicon Valley 253

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. He even remembered the names of their wives and kids and some details about schools or events. (I I couldn’t believe it, here we were wasting precious time and the dumb sales guy is talking about other stuff.)

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I worked at Multiflow, a name you’d recognize, ending up running the OS group. He was my role model at Convergent, mentor at Ardent and partner at E.piphany. Future posts will have some Ben stories. steve Chris Ryland , on October 5, 2009 at 12:08 pm Said: Anyway, looking forward to this series.

North Carolina 131

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks.

Silicon Valley 127

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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 244

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” Except at this VC conference, 100 or so of the 300 attendees had badges that had their first name and only the last initial of their last name.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 267

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Capital Factory Women in Tech Summit 2017 In conjunction with our month of women speakers and related programming, we are excited to announce our first Women In Tech Summit on August 23rd. This afternoon long Summit will bring together the most influential, and inspiring women across verticals. Register ASAP to secure your spot.

Austin 54

Austin Vertical Venture Capital Founder 54

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.),

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The “Good” Student » 14 Responses Shane Rogers , on April 6, 2009 at 1:37 pm Said: The names of ‘secret’ customers is funny. Their code name was UTR (Up The River) in reference to their geographic location up the Potomac River. I used to work for a company located in Arlington, VA that had the CIA as a client.

Silicon Valley 194

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Unintended Consequences – Video Editing As these boards are flying out the door, one of the software engineers at SuperMac got to thinking about what did you do with video once you did get it into a computer – so he wrote the first Quicktime-based video editor which we called ReelTime.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. That meant that our boards were packaged in boxes sold to retailers and were displayed on shelves in their computer stores.

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

This is useful for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is to help you navigate the right channels in your vertical and open doors to potential customers. And founding teams with limited operational backgrounds in their vertical or domain will create doubt. (An Never discount the power of a warm intro.

Advisory Board 48

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cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

But it’s probably wise to be more secretive in some vertical markets: [link]. and an investor, has a great blog on entrepreneurship and venture capital. Then again, there’s a difference between publishing a description of the idea on your website and simply announcing a name and perhaps a tag line. link] Nivi.

Stealth 68

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David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. . Pro Publica has a Nonprofit Explorer database searchable by principal name on all nonprofit filings, so you can see a person’s nonprofit activities. . the Untouched Vertical.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. Agilent is a $5.8

Silicon Valley 186

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. Spooky Music Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career. Here was the guy who invented the field I had spent the first five years of my adult life working on. Play spooky music here.

Silicon Valley 203

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The Next Web

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Founded in 2008, Shanghai-based CooTek is the company behind TouchPal X Keyboard and TouchPal Contacts , which lets you type contact names directly on your smartphone’s dial pad. Success draws attention, and the last thing you would want to do is step on the toes of China’s Internet giants — namely Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

China 122

China Developer Intellectual Property Mobile 122

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? Sure one guy got kicked out – which could have been avoided if he ran company well enough to keep financial control – and the other hung in there and got institutions named after him. Yet you never hear who built that company. Who was he?

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand.

Silicon Valley 201

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Reply Greg Moreno , on August 7, 2009 at 8:26 pm Said: I came here looking for tips, ideas, and inspirations for entrepreneurs but now I am more interested in your war and spy stories Reply YA , on September 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm Said: Steve: you may wish to know that PVO Strany is not an official name, it is a journalistic term.

Silicon Valley 173

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.”

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

I just found out that someone stole my idea today and also is using my name with “The&# in front of it. Reply Gabriel Gunderson , on December 3, 2009 at 9:58 am Said: Eager to hear about the less benign time! Thanks for sharing. Reply Chris , on December 3, 2009 at 10:26 am Said: Thanks for sharing.

Silicon Valley 166

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.)

Silicon Valley 155

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

Silicon Valley 203

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

As its name should communicate, the Customer Development model focuses on developing customers for the product or service your startup is building. These steps mesh seamlessly and support a startup’s ongoing product development activities. Each step results in specific deliverables.

Customer Development 253

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

Perhaps you can determine whether a product is new by asking customers to name the competition. If they can’t name anything, you’ve got a new product that you can position in a new market (or in non-new market by comparing your product to substitutes (there are no direct competitors in this case)). It was a new product.

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

abovethecrowd.com

APRIL 17, 2013

eBay recently launched an aggressive campaign attacking Amazon’s rate table on a vertical-by-vertical basis ( those percentages can be found here ). Apple Internet iphone IPO marketplaces social networking Uncategorized Venture Capital Web/Tech Commission Marketplace online marketplaces pricing'

Europe 101

Europe Social Network Technical Review IPO 101

Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

Instead of arguing why Dallas might be better than Houston we should be talking about how we can work together to get our share of venture capital dollars more in line with our population size and startup activity by unlocking additional capital sources that have been previously inaccessible to tech.

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Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

I’m sure its customers wonder, “Why is an organic grocer named RydeOn?”. For example, if you’re an early-stage SaaS provider that is shifting from a horizontal solution to a vertical focus, your mission, culture, and competencies can stay the same and the pivot transition will probably go smoothly. Not all pivots are created equal.

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

My pet name for the process is “Ortho.&# These are the markets for continuous innovations of all stripes. These markets are also the markets that MBAs are trained to deal with, markets where cost management is more important than technical innovation. Ortho kills. Increasing returns markets exist.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950′s/’60′s where was the money coming from? You never heard of them because their work was secret.

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VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Don’t take my word for it – in the roundup of venture capital predictions for 2017 , I found it to be the top recurring theme. Many large companies will be built (Michael Wolfe, Point Nine Capital). Venture Capital investments in AI, Europe 2016 (Source: Dealroom ). Billion in VC funding.

Artificial Inteligence 122

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Startup 122

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

Silicon Valley 210

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Haystack

JANUARY 2, 2020

A topic that’s been on my mind a lot in 2019 is “time diversity” in venture capital funds. I can name a few 4-year funds on one hand. These are firms that have returned capital at scale. used to be around 5 years. Today, it’s rare to find a 5-year fund. I know of one.

Portfolio 76

Portfolio Venture Capital Vertical Limited Partner 76

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. All with names, addresses, phone numbers, job titles; all wonderful data longing for human contact. This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers.

Silicon Valley 210

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 31, 2021

They’re popping up in a variety of different verticals, led by one called On Deck and they’re causing a lot of people to ask the question if a very specific and highly relevant continuing professional education and network is buyable in smaller chunks off the shelf… Is college worth it? But what about the network?

Networking 214

Networking Programming Silicon Valley Founder 214

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. This post, which is divided in two parts, is the story of the first time it happened to me. Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.)

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