Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

For decades large companies have gone shopping in Silicon Valley for startups. What can companies learn from others’ failed efforts to integrate startups into large companies? The answer - there are two types of integration strategies, and they depend on where the startup is in its lifecycle. The Innovation Portfolio.

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? —— When I wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owners Manual , I believed that Life Sciences startups didn’t need Customer Discovery. – See more here.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

Steve Blank

AUGUST 19, 2013

But what if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? 75% or more of all the funds needed by a Life Science startup will be spent on clinical trials and regulatory approval. Pharma companies are staggering under the costs.

Venture Capital 301

Venture Capital Startup Lean Philadelphia 301

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

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.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

This is a guest post by my Startup Owner’s Manual co-author Bob Dorf. While statistics are weak on startup success rates, the worst one I’ve seen suggests that 2 in 1000 venture backed startups will ever achieve $100-million or more in valuation. Can every startup skyrocket like Facebook or Square or Google?

Startup 332

Startup Cofounder Customer Development Viral 332

Steve Blank

MAY 27, 2010

Startups need to have a great lawyer, accountant, patent attorney, etc. Some of their other requests were just “comfort” issues like putting the software in escrow to protect Visio in case our startup went out of business. Most of these points might have sounded great in law school but were impossible for a startup to deliver.

CTO Hire 287

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Software Review Startup 287

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2015

He’s now run several Lean LaunchPad classes and has seen a ton of healthcare startups. Here’s his advice for startups in this space. Over the past couple of years as Director of Innovation for Intermountain Healthcare I’ve mentored and worked with many Healthcare-focused startups. For a proof of concept or pilot this may be OK.

Startup 120

Startup Early Stage Azure Lean 120

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.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley New York City New York Venture Capital 120

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. How To Build a Web Startup – The Lean LaunchPad Edition. Use the Startup Tools Page as the resource for tool choices).

Lean 333

Lean Web Coder Business Model 333

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

What makes startups succeed or fail? More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near death experiences along the way. Three months ago I wrote about my ex-student Max Marmer and the Startup Genome Project.

Software Review 292

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 292

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2023

Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stage startup failure by helping teams find product/market fit and raise initial capital. They do the most to de-risk the early stages of a startup. Reducing Startup Risk.

Technical Cofounder 346

Technical Cofounder Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 346

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 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “ Hail Mary ” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster. Startups are hard. People skills. Fund raising skills.

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Early Stage Technical Review Startup 332

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

He set up Blackbox.vc, a seed accelerator for technology startups (and one of the tour stops for entrepreneurs from around the world.) They went to work gathering deep knowledege of what makes successful Internet startups. Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. better user growth.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. Ash Maurya , the CEO of WiredReach, has extended my work by building a model of Customer Development for Web Startups. Go read both of his posts on Discovery and Validation for web startups.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 266

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

With the Covid-19 virus a worldwide pandemic, if you’re leading any startup or small business, you have to be asking yourself, “What’s Plan B? If you’re running a startup or small business, your first priority (after your family) is keeping your employees and customers safe. “Winter is coming.”. And what’s in my lifeboat?”.

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Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Startups are the search to find order in chaos. At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Investors bet on a startup CEO to find the repeatable and scalable business model. Steve Blank.

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

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. But it also requires you to ask a few questions about your startup before you use it.

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

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 326

Artificial Inteligence Marketing Startup Silicon Valley 326

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. Now the company is in crisis mode.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover , iterate and execute. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

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 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

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 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

Unfortunately, for startups entering a regulated market following this advice this might not be the optimum path. And why was Bill’s advice of staying away from Washington flawed for startups? These barriers to new innovative startups are called economic rent. Regulation What’s regulatory capture? Why is it bad? In the U.S.

Washington 271

Washington Government Marketing Silicon Valley 271

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.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

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 212

Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 212

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. startups might run into an alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies, for example; ATF , CFPB , DEA , EPA , FAA , FCC , FDA , FDIC , FERC , FTC , OCC , OSHA , SEC. In the U.S.

Marketing 321

Marketing Startup Government SEC 321

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2016

The academic year is in full swing at Stanford and already we’re deep into our new Hacking for Diplomacy course.

Lean 273

Lean Saudi Arabia Austria Silicon Valley 273

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2009

That changed when I joined the board of a startup, and we sued Microsoft and Sony on the same day for patent infringement – and won $120 million. At one of my entrepreneurship classes at Stanford, Dan Dorosin , of Fenwick & West LLP guest lectures about startups and Intellectual Property. Outside the U.S. Public use in the U.S.

Intellectual Property 213

Intellectual Property IP Software Review Non-disclosure Agreement 213

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups. But paradoxically, in spite of all their seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

What’s become apparent in the last few technology hype cycles is that for startups and their investors there is a short multi-year window of opportunity (at the Peak of Inflated Expectations) to sell a startup at an inflated price. Shiny Object meets First Mover Advantage.

Artificial Inteligence 318

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 318

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

Vertical 149

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 149

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2012

Brad Feld’s new book Startup Communities joins the two other “must reads,” ( Regional Advantage and Startup Nation ) and one “must view” ( The Secret History of Silicon Valley ) for anyone trying to understand the components of a regional cluster. These events are a good proxy for the health and depth of a startup community.

Community 333

Community Silicon Valley San Francisco Venture Capital 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. What’s been missing for everyone is: a common language for investors to communicate objectives to startups. Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan Lean LaunchPad Life Sciences Teaching'

Incubator 310

Incubator Intellectual Property Startup Lean 310

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2011

Over the last 40 years Technology investors have learned that the success of startups are not just about the technology but “it’s about the team.”. Startup Team Lessons Learned. As many teams as most startup incubators.). And that teams matter as much in entrepreneurial classes as they do in startups. SEAL Team saying.

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Startup Lean Engineer Business Model 324