Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context.

Search 320

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? But I dont think most startups really have a need for someone to do that on a full time basis. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. So what would a search process for a business model look like? In 2004 I funded IMVU, a startup by Will Harvey and Eric Ries.

Lean 286

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 286

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 5, 2009 It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. But this is wrong, too.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. So what would a search process for a business model look like? In 2004 I funded IMVU, a startup by Will Harvey and Eric Ries.

Lean 178

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 178

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.).

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

The Next Web

FEBRUARY 7, 2014

The chances of your startup failing are perilously high. Most entrepreneurs think it can’t happen to them, but in fact recent research from Harvard Business School lecturer Shikhar Ghosh finds approximately 75 percent of all startups go under. Unfortunately, most startups don’t operate in a space with a lot of stability.

Forecast 136

Forecast Startup Metrics Agile 136

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. And it will lead to more startups and job creation.

Engineer 278

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 278

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. Startup blogging was hardly "cool" back then.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.”. Yet for a startup a cover-up culture is death. In a startup founders and the board need to do exact the opposite of a large company – failures need to be shared, discussed and dissected to extract “lessons learned” so a new direction can be set.

Forecast 264

Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 264

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

To give you a better idea of what entrepreneurs in this industry are thinking about during each phase of the startup process, I interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs from all over the world, including our own COO Noah Parsons. The one-page pitch format is also more suitable for SaaS businesses that are constantly testing new ideas.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance so you can adjust your plan on the fly, quickly and easily. Do startups have a manual?

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 14, 2017

and also being involved in other startups I have seen a number of pivots, some of them worked well and others in hindsight probably needed some more thought, but all have been a learning experience! One of the great benefits of a startup is their ability to be agile and adapt quickly to a changing environment.

Technical Review 157

Technical Review Architecture Revenue Channel 157

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

In the summer of 1999, I started working on a startup from my college dorm. And the great ideas that became todays successful tech startups dwarf anything that had been done to that point. Nonetheless, my first startup was a tool for college students from elite colleges to create resumes and help them find jobs. And Google?

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

The startup founder who gets fired just as his/her company is growing into large company could be a cliché – if it wasn’t so true – and painful. Scalable Startups at Adolescence. In our previous post we posited that Scalable Startups are designed to become large companies. Let’s take a look at why.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. It crashed back down to earth as one of the largest startup failures on record. They made other assumptions about the type of sales channel, partnerships and revenue model they would need. The result was a classic startup failure writ large.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 10, 2010

It turns out that there are four distinct types of entrepreneurial organizations; s mall businesses , scalable startups , large companies and social entrepreneurs. When business was bad they figured out why, adapted and worked harder still. Scalable Startup Entrepreneurship. Who is an entrepreneur really?

Silicon Valley 328

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur United States New York City 328

Up and Running

DECEMBER 5, 2016

Develop a forecast: Basic forecasts and budgets are critical; tracking them is even more so. The idea here was that business plan should no longer be just a single event. Here at Palo Alto Software in 2007 and 2008, we embraced these planning concepts and moved toward a more agile planning process.

Lean 60

Lean Silicon Valley Business Model Forecast 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. Experienced entrepreneurs kept finding that no business plan survived first contact with customers. He called it the “Lean Startup.”.

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Lean Georgia Michigan Business Model 317