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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. And the best startups spun out of Stanford were building components for weapon systems. Indeed, Silicon Valley was born as a center for weapon systems development and its software and silicon helped end the Cold War.

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10 Silicon Valley Facts Every Entrepreneur Should Know

YoungUpstarts

Silicon Valley – a fantastic moniker that conjures lots of images, right? Like all those giant companies, Silicon Valley essentially started with a garage. It was in their garage in Palo Alto that paved the way to the rise of Silicon Valley. But why “Silicon Valley”? The “starters”?

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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.

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How to Configure Your Startup Team

Both Sides of the Table

Final startup grind from msuster. And the folks at Startup Grind have been kind enough to invite me to present this morning in Mountain View on the topic. PM’s are underrated in Silicon Valley these days. PMs are a vital part of a tech startup. And what your views / tips for early-stage startup teams are.

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Inconsistency And Premature Scaling Main Cause For Startup Failure: Blackbox

YoungUpstarts

Blackbox , founded by entrepreneurs Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and Max Marmer, in June released its first Startup Genome Report — a 67-page in depth analysis on what makes Silicon Valley startups successful based on profiling over 650 startups. 74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling.

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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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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.