Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 Product Development Diagram 1. Where Are the Customers?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

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. Product Development – How do you engineer it? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Time to Market – How long?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. Engineers as Salesmen I thought (and still do) that this sales guy walked on water.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

ConversionXL

JANUARY 14, 2020

In each case, an extension to the existing solution was shipped in a search engine–friendly way and now drives a lot of organic traffic, while also improving the product. First, they have to be publicly accessible for users and search engines. Unless you’re a small, agile startup, shipping new features isn’t as simple as it sounds.

SEO 159

SEO Framework SCRUM Search 159

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single? Sign me up.

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Agile VC

FEBRUARY 5, 2014

Potential customers’ willingness to pay will help you segment your target market (by customer size, vertical, geography, etc) more effectively than simply “researching” your market in abstract. Some potential customers won’t take your product seriously unless you’re charging for it.

Revenue 234

Revenue Product B2B Marketing 234

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

I have a question though- do you think that most content metrics (the ebook example you mentioned) should be developed by the "author" to target their specific data, or do you think there are opportunities for a new business vertical that give these tools directly to the creator. August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

Their mission is to allow scientists and engineers to focus on the fundamental research needed to solve complex problems without the expensive and difficult data management usually required. However valuable it can be, the conceptual and technological adoption curve for Pilosa can be daunting for even the most sophisticated engineering teams.

Open Source 48

Open Source Startup Caching Database 48

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about 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. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What plan says that?

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

David Teten

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

We’ve revectored to an agile development methodology. Our process to process appeals is particularly bad; # appeals not yet heard forms a vertical line if we graph it. Kappos: New trademark commissioner Debbie Cohn is ‘the little engine that could and does’ They’re dialed in on first action penancies 1.5-3.5

Intellectual Property 60

Intellectual Property Detroit Technical Review Software Review 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

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. A few successful ones do all these things. But if you have a web based product the right answer may be 300-500. Thank you, Steve.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

YoungUpstarts

MAY 4, 2015

Here are the reasons why you should create a “vertical” social network for your brand: Create a more personalized social experience. If someone types a question about your company into a search engine or a social media site, you often don’t know if they received the correct response — or any result at all. Better spot customers’ needs.

Social Network 100

Social Network Vertical Networking San Francisco 100

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

Best sales person, best analyst, best accountant, best engineer, whatever. And while companies might still organize themselves as a hierarchy, how we get work done now is less vertical and much more horizontal. Or because they stuck around the longest. They had the most tenure. It gets back to what we talked about.

Leadership 60

Leadership Demand Global Community 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 124

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. Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.)

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy. Many problems are catastrophic only if allowed to fester.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] I was always kind of curious.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 195

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Curved lines are visibly flexible and can communicate agility and reactivity. Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines. Unlike vertical or diagonal lines, they look as though gravity has already acted upon them and there is nowhere for them to fall. Vertical lines run perpendicular to the horizon.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. There was no proselytizing about any particular methodology, yet the results are compelling.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Duct Tape Marketing

DECEMBER 17, 2019

And for a while I was working on the vertical of religion. And it turned into Expression Engine. Claire Diaz-Ortiz: And so you need to be able to be agile and to be able to respond both to unhappy customers or global crises or to things going wrong. ” John Jantsch: So I set up about 25 Typepad blogs for friends as well.

Social Media 39

Social Media Media Framework Advertising 39

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. Reply Harvey , on April 11, 2009 at 7:05 pm Said: Some of the best engineers I hired out of school were not 3.5+ And even not-so-new engineers. You just get successful. GPA or better. Steve Blank [.]

Silicon Valley 327

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, Fred Terman, encouraged scientists and engineers to set up companies to build these microwave tubes for the military. This next product, the Traveling Wave Tube, would have a major impact on electronic intelligence. Fred Terman was just getting warmed up. Much more was to come.

Silicon Valley 155

Silicon Valley RSS SBIC California 155

Cracking the Code

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

Comparing the list to the top 300 leading SaaS companies in the US, some interesting trends emerge: Europe is showing strength in data/ analytics and security, driven by the booming ecosystem in Israel but is less represented in developer/infrastructure and vertical applications. and Intacct for $0.85B.

Europe 83

Europe Cloud API 83

Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

Encouraged by their Dean, Fred Terman, scientists and engineers left Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory to set up companies to build microwave tubes and systems for the military. doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by Stanford engineering faculty members or senior research associates (staff.)

Silicon Valley 144

Silicon Valley RSS Germany California 144

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Their own internal culture would tie them up in knots, and agile startups could run rings around them. But sales came first. (By

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2022

Power Recommendation Engines. Engineers can input design goals into AI-driven generative design software , along with parameters such as performance or spatial requirements, materials, manufacturing methods, and cost constraints. Examples here , here and here. An example application is Dall-E. Generative Design of Physical Products.

Artificial Inteligence 417

Artificial Inteligence Software Review Algorithm Technical Review 417

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

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. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. But I was breathing heavy and it felt like I was looking at supercomputer porn.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

I am the VP of Engineering at a cutting-edge startup that sells software built on the.NET platform. You whine about how hard it is to find good engineers, then go on and on about how you intentionally avoid at least half of the market for skilled people? It’s like arguing against vertical software. How about ABAPer?

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Bontq – hosted bug tracking and project management needs.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110