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Why The Government is Isn’t a Bigger Version of a Startup

Steve Blank

Some of the best and brightest wanted to work for defense contractors or corporate research and development labs. Indeed, Silicon Valley was born as a center for weapon systems development and its software and silicon helped end the Cold War. The table below summarizes a few of the salient differences.

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A heartbreaking story about time and money.

Berkonomics

Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. Not long after, the company was sold in a “fire sale” amounting to slightly less than the debt on the books. The art of good management.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

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?

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How to Configure Your Startup Team

Both Sides of the Table

PM’s are underrated in Silicon Valley these days. Without strong PMs you build crappy products that nobody needs or that real people can’t use. Your first sales people should be consultative sellers who can fuel evangelical sales. For the wrong reasons. PMs are a vital part of a tech startup.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

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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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

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. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

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Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. See the presentation here.).