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Learning Through Reflection

Steve Blank

To be honest I built the class out of frustration watching schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs that all they need to know is how to write a business plan or how to sit in an incubator building a product. Demo Days Versus Lesson Learned Presentations. Everything depends on a demo, presentation and speaking style.

Lean 120
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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2021 Lessons Learned Presentations

Steve Blank

Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the story of a team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery. . – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products.

Lean 385
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The Class That Changed the Way Entrepreneurship is Taught

Steve Blank

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 433
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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2020 Lesson Learned Presentations

Steve Blank

Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “here’s how smart I am, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the teams’ stories of a 10-week journey of hard-won learning and discovery. This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks.

Oakland 301
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SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

But Apple had planned to announce and demo QuickTime without a way to get video into the Mac. Something Profound Engineering gave us a demo of the prototype board and software and asked, “Do you guys think we can sell a few of these boards?” We must have made them play the demo twenty times. My first IPO at Convergent.

Video 164
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Someone Stole My Startup Idea – Part 2: They Raised Money With My.

Steve Blank

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Good stuff too.