Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. Another piece of trivial: the road that is the side-entrance (during business hours) to Agilent Corporation HQ in Santa Clara is named “Terman Lane&# after Terman.

Silicon Valley 279

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) So what’s wrong the product development model? Where Are the Customers?

Customer Development 241

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another? Others you need to know when you execute the plan.

Vertical 123

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn. Gracias for another great read Steve!

Silicon Valley 151

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. He even remembered the names of their wives and kids and some details about schools or events. (I I couldn’t believe it, here we were wasting precious time and the dumb sales guy is talking about other stuff.)

Technology 139

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a spec in two years, let alone get 10′s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done.

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter.

Silicon Valley 263

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