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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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.

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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. to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

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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

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. At HP the founders were still at the company and still running the business.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

This includes co-founders, management, team member, board members, investors, clients, etc. In the meantime we are narrowing our focus to three verticals (bioinformatics, connected devices, security/fraud) and are choosing our clients very carefully to tell the best success stories we can.

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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.

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Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

And while companies might still organize themselves as a hierarchy, how we get work done now is less vertical and much more horizontal. Do your part, but work with colleagues across the organization to execute the strategy, to be agile, to drive innovation, all those things that companies are really working hard to drive and be successful.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Let this article serve us reminders to founders and boards alike Reply Michael F. The Curse of a New Building At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do&# companies to [.] [.] I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. I teach teams various Agile techniques, and occasionally get told some particular trick is cheating. When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of funding and got an 8-digit term sheet that same afternoon.

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crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

For example, Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, always used to say he sold hope, not makeup. Curved lines are visibly flexible and can communicate agility and reactivity. Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines. Vertical lines run perpendicular to the horizon. Vertical lines draw the eye upward.

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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.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

The first step in Customer Development was Customer Discovery ; extracting hypotheses from the business plan and getting the founders out of the building to test the hypotheses in front of customers. They will realize that you have built a startup that’s agile, resilient and customer-centric. Just as a refresher.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. In other words, you can always invest in process, batch size reduction, and agility as an alternative to preventing a specific problem. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. Many problems are catastrophic only if allowed to fester.

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crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 13, 2010

Why you should have a co-founder – [link]. Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model – [link]. Good question: Where are the ‘vertical’ social media specialists? Understanding Salespeople at Startups – [link]. There are no firm answers in social media – [link].

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crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 13, 2010

Why you should have a co-founder – [link]. Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model – [link]. Good question: Where are the ‘vertical’ social media specialists? Understanding Salespeople at Startups – [link]. There are no firm answers in social media – [link].

Social Media 95

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

But what I remind them is that great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.) You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.

Silicon Valley 332

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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.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. A healthy disrespect for the status quo coupled with passion, persistence and agility trumps everything else.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. A healthy disrespect for the status quo coupled with passion, persistence and agility trumps everything else.

Customer Development 225

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crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 15, 2015

6 Things That Can Help Female Founders Bridge The Gap Between Idea And Success crowdspring.co/1IoaLD1. Why there won’t be an Uber in every vertical – buff.ly/1KNtdUj. Why VCs Draw Big Salaries but Look for Founders Who Take Little crowdspring.co/1bf5Zuh. How To Avoid Agility. Features are not goals – buff.ly/1IkHsRo.

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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.

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

It’s like arguing against vertical software. ALT.NET is a large sector of the.NET community that isn’t satisfied with the status quo and wants to find the best, most agile way to do things. This is about the mental agility, inquisitiveness and determination of a coder. March 26, 2011 at 9:02 am.

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