Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the Pivots in their search for a repeatable business model.

Business Plan 317

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 317

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. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Taking My Class.

Lean 120

Lean Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder Channel 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. Startups that are agile have mastered one other trick – and that’s Tempo – the ability to make quick decisions consistently over extended periods of time.

Silicon Valley 307

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 307

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing?

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. Can you recognize and capitalize on them? This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. How quickly will you recover? Creative / Pattern Recognition – can you think “out of the box?

Cofounder 229

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Electron-based Venture Capital. Here’s why. They build a minimum feature set.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 263

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. They envisioned that their tiny startup was to going to be a $100 million/year company by creating an entirely new market – selling virtual goods. A scalable startup typically requires external “risk&# capital to create market demand and scale.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Dot.com Bubble ( 1995-2000): “ Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The goals were “first mover advantage,” “grab market share” and “get big fast.”

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

At the same time we were educating the press , we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

Back from a family humanitarian trip/vacation to one of the last bastions of Communism where “marketing&# isn’t even a profession and entrepreneurship is a crime. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner. ——————-.

Business Model 235

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 235

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. The VC firm delivered a term sheet for an 8-digit second round that afternoon.

Venture Capital 239

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 239

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get to market. While this signaled that investments in technology companies could be very lucrative, both Shockley and Fairchild could only be funded through corporate partners – there was no venture capital industry. But by the early 1960?s

Engineer 311

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 311

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you.

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 303

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs. But starting in the last quarter of that century and accelerating in this one, a new form of financing – risk capital (angel and venture capital) — emerged.

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Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup IP 175

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

When venture capital teamed up with technology entrepreneurs in the 1960’s they brought with them the canonical MBA planning tool – the business plan. Large companies had VP’s of Sales and Marketing, so VC’s made startups organize that way as well. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development.

Business Model 267

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 267

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Here’s how.

Silicon Valley 297

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 297

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model. Here’s how.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 270

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years.

Engineer 284

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 284

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

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. How was this possible?

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) ———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. .

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 136

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Maybe It’s Me When I got to the SuperMac, our Marketing Communications group told me about our “award-winning&# retail packaging for our graphics boards. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it. Yet when I saw our retail package, I was confused. Worry about the sales results.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Im one of those people whos been programming since they can remember.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.). There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.)

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

“After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. Agile Development: launch an MVP early and iterate quickly. Maximum Viable Product.

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART , the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems.

Silicon Valley 194

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank (tags: startup) [.] Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA. Steve Blank, Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA: … entrepreneurs instinctualy realize that the best advocate for their careers is themselves [.] You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Reply Create.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. But that job is changing dramatically, and this brings us to the next major problem facing traditional media organizations: Media companies are failing at marketing. There are too many products clamoring for attention.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 However, no markets last forever. Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. billion dollar test and measurement company.

Silicon Valley 186

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 186

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley « Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA Rocket Science 2: Drinking the Kool-Aid » 2 Responses Ben , on July 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said: Great post Steve. I can’t get this one out of my head. during World War II.

Silicon Valley 142

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Truth: There’s nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Myth: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback. But they do not blindly do what customers tell them , nor do they mechanically attempt to optimize numbers.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260