Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2015

Just before the holidays I had coffee with Anne, an ex MBA student running a fairly large product group at a search engine company, now out trying to raise money for her own startup. The Columbia Startup Lab is a visible symbol of how the university is making entrepreneurship an integral part of all colleges at the university.

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Silicon Valley New York City New York Venture Capital 120

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2012

The irony is that as good as some of these nascent startups are in material science, sensors, robotics, medical devices, life sciences, etc., For the first time, startups can today think about a Total Available Market in the billions of users (smart phones, tablets, PC’s, etc.) And who can blame them. Facebook and Social Media.

Silicon Valley 336

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Social Media Media 336

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

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. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup.

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Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. as a distribution channel have vastly reduced the amount of capital a startup needs at the early stage when the risk is greatest. Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds. ——-.

Early Stage 287

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 287

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. This left an open playing field for Chinese software startups as they “copy to China” existing U.S. If you’re a software startup competing in China, the words that come to mind are “ruthless and relentless.”

China 324

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 324

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. The focus of our first segment with Eric was, “What is the Lean Startup” and how did it start? Origins of the Lean Startup.

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Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

BMNT , a new Silicon Valley company, is combining the Lean Methods it learned in combat with the technology expertise and speed of startups. The OODA Loop was the Lean Startup philosophy before lean. In 2010 Colonel Peter Newell took over the REF and turned its focus into what we would call a Lean Startup.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Afghanistan Iraq Kuwait 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. This left an open playing field for Chinese software startups as they “copy to China” existing U.S. If you’re a software startup competing in China, the words that come to mind are “ruthless and relentless.”

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Working for local startups creates real world intensity and urgency in the course.

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Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened.

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 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 302

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 302

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.). How To Build a Web Startup – The Lean LaunchPad Edition.

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Lean Web Coder Business Model 333

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.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 223

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. How to make corporate innovation work and drive success in startups were the topics of discussion with the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. He was the CEO of two startups.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. The Innovation Corps Startup Team. Given that Silicon Valley had started with scientists and engineers not MBA’s, I thought this was a bet worth making. This week we saw the results.

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Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 303

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 23, 2023

For me, personally : People in the senior ranks at startups usually call themselves operators. I also took an advisory role with another startup working on national security technology, QuSecure. You can get wealthy with the right startup, but many startups fail, so it’s a long shot. They need you. Where should you go?

Government 217

Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 217

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. So big companies rarely acquire startups.

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Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 269

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

But he left to work on what he told me he came to do - crack the innovation code of Silicon Valley and share it with the rest of the world. He set up Blackbox.vc, a seed accelerator for technology startups (and one of the tour stops for entrepreneurs from around the world.) Startup Genome Report. better user growth.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Technical Marketing Years later in my career I would realize I had simply reinvented what the early pioneers in Silicon Valley knew and did – hiring engineers who were domain experts who could talk as peers to customers and communicate effectively with their own company’s engineers.

Engineer 205

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 205

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2021

At the front-end of these innovations are startups – organizations the Department of Defense hasn’t previously dealt with at scale. Mrinal and Jeff’s article below explains how startups can adapt and thrive while working with the Defense Department. And how the Department of Defense is learning to work with startups.

Artificial Inteligence 337

Artificial Inteligence Marketing Startup Silicon Valley 337

Steve Blank

JANUARY 7, 2010

The Future is Clear – Microwave Valley Forever. In 1956 Hewlett Packard, back then a maker of test equipment was the valley’s largest electronics employer with 900 employees. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory , the first semiconductor company in the valley, set up shop in Mountain View. military and intelligence agencies.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco United States Startup 182

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

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. Given its inward focus, Berkeley has always been the neglected sibling in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. But part of his life that that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry is that Bill Perry used Silicon Valley to help end the cold war.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 176

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 241

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 241

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure. While I had been part of a few failed startups, none of them had fallen squarely on my shoulders until Rocket Science Games where my business card said CEO. “What’s gone and what’s past help.

Redemption 331

Redemption Cofounder Silicon Valley Burn Rate 331

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

There couldn’t have been a worse choice for CEO in Silicon Valley. Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley was an Oxymoron A key premise of our new company was that our video compression and authoring technology would revolutionize how games were made and played. This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Video 142

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 150

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 150

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. So big companies rarely acquire startups.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 161

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. If you like skiing, hiking, biking, rafting, golfing, camping, fishing, picnicking, rock climbing, and startups – you’d like Bend. Startups in Bend.

Silicon Valley 314

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 314

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

These posts cover two distinct periods – the first, the rise of “ Microwave Valley ” chronicles the decade of 1946-1956 as Stanford University became the hub of military/industry contracting in the Bay Area. . ————– These posts will make a lot more sense if you look at the earlier Secret History posts.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 157

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

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. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery.

Burn Rate 249

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 249

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2014

Startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but interestingly we see that companies are not larger versions of startups. Two methods, Design Thinking and Customer Development (the core of the Lean Startup) provide the tactical day-to-day process of how to turn ideas into products. .

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Customer Development Design Developer Customer 335

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 185

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 185

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup. When they graduate, the Stanford students on these teams have the pick of jobs in startups, companies, and consulting firms. Our goal was to teach both theory and practice.

Lean 394

Lean Security Asia SBIR 394

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. He previously founded N&N Investments LLC, a real estate investment holding company; and is a program leader and fellow of the Startup Leadership Program. .

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Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

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. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. We were sitting in our cheap hotel room when the phone rang.

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126