Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent.

North Carolina 146

North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 146

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

The longer you wait to find out about the problem, the more likely it is to have fallen out of the human-memory cache. Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

This is true of most web application servers, caches like memcached, and all of the network infrastructure that connects them. This has two major drawbacks: the central directory can become a single point of failure, and there is a performance cost for having to consult the directory ever time you want to access data anywhere in the cluster.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Three of my favorite: memcached - an in-memory object caching system. link] And - of course - going through [link] and reading up on the various different approaches different companies have (successfully) taken towards getting scalability at reasonably low cost. MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

When he returned to Boston he put together a business plan to build a water powered mill that required a $400k investment – $100k for the factory and $300k for start-up costs.

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley Securities and Exchange Commission Venture Capital RSS 163