SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 23, 2007

Having produced a variety of events over the years and having been on the boards of both the Technology Council and AITP, I can say that its really hard to attract a critical mass of interesting people. Why does this hurt, well I was just reading a few blog posts yesterday on finding startup co-founders: Where do you Find Cofounders?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. The VP of Sales and I flew to Providence to convince Andy van Dam at Brown to join our company, or at a minimum lead our advisory board. This is the first of a series of posts on the company.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. I realized the Customer Development model needs to be clearer in what exactly a startup is supposed to do, regardless of the business model. But it also requires you to ask a few questions about your startup before you use it.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. We needed to redefine or resegment the playing field (the existing graphics board market) so it favored us. No, not really.

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Nor was there anyone with game experience on our board. Given my fiduciary responsibility to my board and my investors did his blasé answer force me to grab him by the collar and scream, “Snap out of it, we’re in trouble!” Call a board meeting and say we may have a serious problem? I know what’s great and what’s not.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Their presentation looked like this: Market/Opportunity Lessons Learned Slide 1 Lessons Learned Slide 2 Lessons Learned Slide 3 Why We’re Here Telling the Cafepress Customer Discovery and Customer Validation story allowed Fred and Maheesh to take the VC’s on their journey year by year. Your results may vary.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers. As a company with a past history, the company had a massive advantage over a typical startup – it had customers. Normally in a startup you spend an inordinate amount of time and energy in Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. If so, where?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And the German night fighters had their own on-board radar. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. No kidding.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

<< (tags: startups) [.] A game company without gamers (on the board or founding team) is an oxymoron – with an emphasis on the last syllable. Reply Dan L , on July 13, 2009 at 7:32 pm Said: Interesting story. It all makes me wonder if the game biz is really its own kind of beast when it comes to this stuff.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford designed Klystrons producing 2½ Megawatts were manufactured by Varian and Litton would power the radar in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) built at the height of the cold war.) His commercial activities had him on the board of directors of HP, Watkins-Johnson, Ampex, and Director and Vice Chairman of SRI.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. That meant that our boards were packaged in boxes sold to retailers and were displayed on shelves in their computer stores.

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www.greenhornconnect.com

OCTOBER 3, 2011

Resources Events Feed Job Board Students. ” Transitioning from partners in an informal collaboration to co-owners of an actual business may seem like a big step, but it is a necessary one that every successful startup eventually must take. 2) You’re hiring employees. All tags: Forex Brokers. Monthly archive.

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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. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

But we knew something they didn’t; the total available market for color graphics boards was measurable by looking at an adjacent market, the color desktop publishing software market. Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ). What happened?

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datacommunitydc.org

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

Recommendation engines are arguably one of the trendiest uses of data science in startups today. Board member at Data Community DC. This entry was posted in Commentary , Data Science DC , Methods , Rant and tagged data science , e-commerce , machine learning , recommendation engines. Archives Select Month September 2013 (12).

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www.cscyphers.com

MARCH 8, 2012

13, 2011 13:30 in Startups. Let’s face it; the make up of your team is absolutely critical to the success of any startup. The fun part of about startups is that things will go wrong ; usually catastrophically in an “Oh my God, oh my God, we’re all going to die” kind of wrong. and other activities.

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venturehacks.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Venture Hacks Good advice for startups. SUPPORTED BY Products Archives @venturehacks Books AngelList About RSS How to pick a co-founder by Naval Ravikant on November 12th, 2009 Update : Also see our 40-minute interview on this topic. FAQs What if the right guy already has his own startup? but it’s manageable.

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startupbaltimore.org

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Home Events Calendar Job Board Startup Resources Archives About Contact Interested in an Open-Data Contest in Baltimore? To my knowledge none of these people have been successful and all of their ideas are still on their drawing board. Baltimore’s startup community has plenty of room for new leaders.

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www.readwriteweb.com

MARCH 7, 2011

In his post, Roberts says he was not turned off by the quality of startups, but by the investment philosophy pushed by the service. The predominate philosophy pushed by the service, he said, favors a light-touch investment style similar to throwing darts on a board, as opposed to a more concentrated approach. social proof?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

We had a great on-boarding process, complete with a mentoring program and a syllabus of key ideas to be covered. Our engineers built a series of test tags, so you could quickly run a subset of tests in your sandbox that you thought were relevant to your current project or feature. link] June 20, 2009 2:52 PM Anonymoussaid.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Reply steveblank , on May 22, 2009 at 2:39 pm Said: Morteza, The comments about “ignore this post&# were meant that if your sales channel is the web you rarely go to trade shows. Part 1 of this post offered some suggestions on going to trade shows to generate awareness. Go to trade shows like it matters.

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time. Update – As a followup, we analyzed all of these startup failure post-mortems to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. Also worth a read after you review these startup failure post-mortems. Post-Mortem Title : How My Startup Failed.

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Software By Rob

MAY 21, 2010

Join nearly 6,000 startup entrepreneurs by subscribing to my RSS feed. I’ve communicated with hundreds of startup founders over the past three years, and I’ve begun to notice a pattern. There are three points during the creating of a startup where the founders are most likely to close up shop.

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discuss.joelonsoftware.com

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

Jason Thursday, October 09, 2008 Deleting … Approving … Join the nextNY mailing list, and check out our archives where this has been beaten to death over and over. Eventually youll catch the ear, the vision, of someone who would like to jump on board, and has something you need in return. The gist: 1. Go to user groups.

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Altgate

DECEMBER 17, 2009

" Well, there are basically three ways you can link pay to performance (in startups): Discretionary (i.e. it's up to the Board or CEO) One or more financial metrics Balanced scorecard For very early stage startups (e.g. Note that the scorecards are only 1 or 2 pages per executive. Bookmark the permalink.

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www.seriesseed.com

MARCH 2, 2010

SeriesSeed.com Series Seed Financing Documents Blog Home Documents Blog Archives Subscribe 09/02/2010 Version 2.0 2) Redline - Series Seed IRA (1 v. 2) Redline - Series Seed Term Sheet (1 v. 2) Series Seed Documents Series Seed COI (v 2.0) In conclusion, I feel very fortunate to be a part of the startup company ecosystem.

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www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

SolidWorks 2: The best VAR management program in the world? Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup failure. In this blog, Marc argues that out of the three core elements of a startup, team, product, and market, the only thing that matters is product/market fit.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

Some 2 million students have trained there since it opened in 1942. The other minor duty of the fire warden was to update the squadron bulletin board. I typed 30 copies, and using the master key I went into every squadron building bulletin board, and posted these orders from the base commander on all 30.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Posted on April 2, 2009 by steveblank A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed. Culture matters.

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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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Whether you’re a conversion optimization agency, consultant, or in-house at a startup or enterprise, investing in the right conversion optimization tool is a big decision. Each test has only 2 main options: Edit or Report. Canvas , by GrowthHackers, helps support the whole growth process (including archiving results).

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture. The irony is that few startups fit these criteria.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

2) Provide corporate management with near real-time divisional sales reports and budgets that indicated when they deviated from plan. His board (led by the DuPont family) tossed him out of General Motors (for the second time) in 1920 when GM sales were $567 million (about $6 billion in today’s dollars.) What happened to him?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Execution by Vertical Market As the class progressed, students asked how the activities/functions of a startup; (Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Development, etc.) Startup activities/functions So we started by listing the basic startup activities/functions we thought that might differ by vertical market.

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