Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

Even with advantages that independent startups can never hope to match, including brand recognition, customers, financial capital, and distribution, I don’t often see the entrepreneurial passion for innovation, agility, and team perseverance exhibited by new startups.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

What we do is try to help make sure that the way of working—the operating system, the culture, the organization's design—is well-matched to that challenge. That's where the whole movement surrounding Agile and Lean fits into this. What's left are these complex problem and creation spaces. Is it complicated? Is it chaotic? Is it simple?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. A Pivot a Week. We’re building the wrong product!”

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

Increase change agility. Change agility represents a startup’s ability to immediately and effectively engage everyone in pending changes and innovations. It starts at the top with the founder and CEO, but has to extend quickly to the bottom of the organization. This requires leadership, teamwork, and trust at all levels.

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Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the Pivots in their search for a repeatable business model. They’re a match for the “How to write a business plan” classes that are offered. Instead of business plans I have suggested that startups use business models.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

Cases and plans are useful for teaching managers of process, not founders. Founders of startups (and new ventures inside existing companies) are searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). experiential.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2020

Build a business culture to match your core values. Build change agility into all your processes. Every founder has a story about the pivot that made their business, such as Starbucks switching to selling coffee from expresso makers, and Flickr from an online game to photo sharing.

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Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

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SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

I did a presentation this week at Coloft that looked at how Non-Technical Founders can go about getting their MVP built. Examples might be a recommendation engine, search engine, matching engine or something with a complex interface. We needed the matching algorithm. It had a passionate group of 50 people attending.

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Austin Startup

MARCH 5, 2019

Boost Biomes CEO and co-founder Jamie Bacher The Forrest Four-Cast: March 5, 2019 Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Jamie Bacher , CEO and co-founder, answered some questions about the San Francisco-based company.

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Austin Startup

AUGUST 30, 2019

The intent of Spark Collider is to help companies match their solutions with Air Force customers who can use them, and in that regard it was a tremendous success. We can and will make it better by working more deliberately to match problems and solutions, as well as bringing in commercial customers and investors.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

The processes used to organize and implement the search for the business model are Customer Development and Agile Development. Unlike existing companies that fire executives when they fail to match a plan, we keep the founders and change the model. It is a tool that better matches the real-world search for the business model.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

These Key Performance Indicators and processes are what make a company efficient —but they are also the root cause of its inability to be agile and innovative. If they don’t, then the management team has simply become caretakers of the founders’ legacy. Act Like a Startup. This never ends well.

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The Startup Magazine

MARCH 14, 2021

Given that the product may still be in development, the marketer also needs to be agile and ready to respond to unexpected obstacles with an early startup marketing strategy. Consider leveraging the founder and team’s expertise and sharing information that can make the reader’s life easier or better in some way.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

Ideally we attempt to match the guests with the case or class session subject. For example, when we taught the value of getting out of the building and agile development, we had Eric Ries talk about the Lean Startup. So we tried to break up our lectures with guest speakers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Go on an agile diet quickly. More on that in a moment.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 15, 2022

A particularly critical moment is when the founders hand over the leadership to a more managerial regime. The challenge during this phase is to stay innovative and agile. There is no time to be changing your culture to match the lifecycle. Geographic expansion. Efficiency and scale. Marty Zwilling.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Our keynote speaker was Palmer Luckey , founder of Oculus and the designer of the Oculus Rift. He’s now the CEO/founder of the AI-focussed defense contractor Anduril Industries. Tom Bedecarré was the founder and CEO of AKQA, the leading digital advertising agency. If you can’t see the video of Palmer Luckey click here.

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YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

Perfect matches are hard to find in love, friendships, and careers. The only perfect, complete match, is found in math. Fixing inefficiencies, technology, self-exploration and improvement, entrepreneurial collaboration, reading about studies in psychology, and the agility to move around physically and between projects.

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View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Given the common challenges encountered by founders as they navigate through this hiring decision, I thought I’d outline some of my thoughts below that can hopefully serve as a simple framework when it comes to making the first Analytics hire at your startup. Many founders confuse the two as they both involve lots of numbers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Ill do my best to match deserving people up with appropriate sponsors, and Ill be glad to recognize those that give on the blog and at the conference itself. Although Im not a developer, I am captivated by the lean and agile start-up model that you write about. Combining agile development with customer developm. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 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. Without the revenue to match its expenses, the company is in now danger of running out of money. innovation.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired.

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Up and Running

JUNE 23, 2015

Meg Wirth and Allyson Cote, founders of Maternova. I was fortunate enough to speak with co-founder Allyson Cote, and hear the Maternova story, as well as some of its exciting plans for the future. Maternal health is a concern the world over, especially in developing nations. The quirky and cute Maternova offices.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 14, 2015

A particularly critical moment is when the founders hand over the leadership to a more managerial regime. The challenge during this phase is to stay innovative and agile. There is no time to be changing your culture to match the lifecycle. Geographic expansion. Efficiency and scale. Marty Zwilling.

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Matching Marketing Dilution Startup 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

If you’ve tried to slog your way through my book on Customer Development you know that I’m insistent that the founders need to be the ones getting outside the building (physically or virtually) to validate all the initial hypotheses of the business model and product. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Agile VC

APRIL 17, 2011

Kayak was started here in my backyard of Boston… co-founder & CTO Paul English and the product/engineering team is based here in Concord MA. Co-founder & CEO Steve Hafner and the business team are based in Norwalk, CT. Led by General Catalyst with participation by co-founders Steve Hafner & Paul English.

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blog.simeonov.com

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I have been thinking a lot recently about how to apply agile development principles to investing and key aspects of startup development such as team building. Both stem from the agile principle of delaying decisions until the last responsible moment. The first post is about agile startup fundraising. Urban legends.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

benjaminjoffe : early adopters of buggy product are visionary customers, sometimes smarter than founders! Many founders dont like to hear that visionary customers are as smart, maybe even more so, than they are. For one, it doesnt match my experience having worked with some true visionaries at all. Brilliant insight.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. Bob looked wistful, “Our founders built a company known for taking risks and moving fast.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. One key difference: unlike HP, which had restricted stock ownership to the founders and top management, Perry made sure everyone at ESL had stock. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

I called the founder and noted that there are SAT tests that are shorter than the survey. Customer Development suggests that founders have continual and timely customer, channel and market information. Founders need three views of information to truly understand what is going on: First-hand knowledge. Continual Data Flow.

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Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 242

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

In a subscription business, maybe your attrition starts matching your acquisition, balancing like magic. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. Nothing seems to matter. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. This feedback is a nasty trap, and it’s just how this room full of otherwise rational adults wound up in a screaming match about rounded corners. They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. Expo SF (May.

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Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

The Startup Lawyer

MARCH 17, 2012

Outsourcing your startup’s early technical development to a dev shop is like riding an elephant in a horseback polo match. You’re on a big beast, but your lack of agility will prevent you from scoring. A dev shop is never a substitute for a technical co-founder.

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Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

New, agile and adroit venture firms with new business models have emerged to deal with the reality that 1) web 2.0 startups require significantly less capital to start, 2) exits for venture firms are predominately acquisitions, and 3) a venture firm with a smaller fund <$150M matches these exits. are example of this class of firm.

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