Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2020

They created a program called Onward California in partnership with the State of California and with the support of governor Newsom. Their model in California was so successful they eventually created a new organization, Onward US, dedicated to putting American workers displaced by COVID-19 back to work.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 25, 2013

The Lean Startup methodology has its roots in the tech sector, where companies need to iterate quickly in order to survive. In fact, at last year’s Lean Startup conference we had speakers from a number other sectors, including government, transportation, education and public health.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. I have an idea for how to connect user social web conversations to 2-way search and contextual advertising.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. Reply Karma in the Lean Startup Era , on January 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm Said: [.]

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born. Our conversation went like this: Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported? When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. Conversion ideas? I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

When you are presenting to a VC there are two conversations going on – the one you are presenting and the one that investors are thinking as they are listening to your presentation. (If Your presentation doesn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

They could have started with the hypothesis they needed both, and then they could have heard customers agreeing, but the next step should have been a “minimum feature set&# -&# product/market fit&# conversation. Reply My take on Customer Development and the Lean Startup | Recess Mobile Blog , on January 9, 2010 at 5:29 am Said: [.]

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

This post is admittedly the outcome of a conversation with a few people over some beers. The conversation centered around a founder who's key question is "Where Do I Find a Developer for My Startup? Tech Events / Meetups - There are lots of Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California that are techie oriented.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2021

Carbon Health is now running some of the largest vaccination sites in California, most famously at Dodger Stadium, in partnership with the City of Los Angeles. Here's my conversation with Eren Bali. That's one of the very, very early companies that I was talking to Lean Startup about. Eren Bali : My name is Eren Bali.

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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. The first question to ask is: “Does your startup have market risk or is it dominated by technical risk?” Lean Startup /Customer Development is used to find answers to the unknowns about customers and markets.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Among other things they conducted 240 A/B tests that resulted in a 49% increase in donation conversion (that was more than $80 million extra cash). Research shows that marketers are spending pennies on their conversion efforts. Just waste all that effort and money – only because their website is not optimized for conversions.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 28, 2020

With the theme “Build Back Better” Jerry Engel , Pete Newell , Steve Weinstein and I co-hosted nearly 500 Lean Educators from 63 countries and 235 universities online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about educators on how we can help our communities rebound, adjust, and recover. — Background.

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

This post is admittedly the outcome of a conversation with a few people over some beers. The conversation centered around a founder who's key question is "Where Do I Find a Developer for My Startup? Tech Events / Meetups - There are lots of Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California that are techie oriented.

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Fractional CTO Southern California Startup Mobile 296

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. Armstrong was a god!

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Austin Startup

MAY 8, 2018

California is way harsher than elsewhere in the country. And the converse is true as well. Finally, as much as I appreciate keeping things lean, moving fast, and skirting the rules where the costs are low, realize that violating laws around employee compensation and hiring/firing can burn you, badly.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

Even though most of this message was already drafted, we also had a Hail Mary of a final acquisition conversation that closed the following morning. The Whole Enchilada For those of you interested in more than The Skinny, keep reading… Countless conversations have been had with key users, customers, advisors, mentors, family and friends.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

New York, California different toilet, same s#@t. The conversation shouldn't end after conversion. Vision Synching in a Lean Startup - Startup Marketing Blog , November 12, 2010 In the age of the lean startup , we often forget about the importance of vision. same as the old boss. The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. 2 weeks in they had outsourced my job, which lead to an awkward conversation. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. Driving across the U.S.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks. Reply My take on Customer Development and the Lean Startup | Recess Mobile Blog , on January 9, 2010 at 5:39 am Said: [.] Reply Links and Thoughts, Monday 10/19/09 | Recess Mobile Blog , on November 18, 2009 at 5:33 pm Said: [.]

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Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 16, 2017

Nearly two years since CA governor Jerry Brown signed the California Fair Pay Act which was designed to close the wage gap, women in Silicon Valley still report that their multi-billion dollar tech giant employers are still paying them less than their male counterparts for equal work (Larson). ComputerScience.org , 2017, [link].

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2020

The stories he told me during our conversation, somber as they are, show the truth of that belief. You can listen to our conversation on Apple podcasts , Google podcasts , or wherever you like to download. Here's my conversation with Carl Liebert. He shared his reflections on why these approaches work. It's member-owned.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks.

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crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 13, 2011

Search engine marketing is a tactic that is perfect for a lean, iterative approach to marketing. It is crucial that goal definition include conversion definition. For instance is a visit to your site what you would consider a conversion? Is a user registration or harvested email address a conversion? Graphic: Sam Michel.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 6, 2012

You can watch the conversation on YouTube and as you’ll see – even though the camera is on we had no problem sparring on topics and coming to a common view (or not). 23:00 Discussion of California’s social media privacy laws. 12:45 Describe the structural, cyclical trends you’re seeing in technology.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

through the Lean Launchpad class. He wanted to fly out to Stanford and sit in the Lean LaunchPad class about to start in the engineering school. Commercialization of an Engineered Pyrolysis Blanket for the Conversion of Forestry Residues to Soil Amendments and Energy Products. If you can’t see the video above click here.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2018

Our primary goal was to teach students Lean Innovation while they engaged in a national public service. And conversely show our sponsors in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community that civilian students can make a meaningful contribution to problem understanding and rapid prototyping of solutions to real-world problems.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

Here's my conversation with Tomas Pueyo. Eric Ries : I appreciate you saying that, and we should certainly reserve a moment to say thank you to all of the spouses and supportive partners that have made possible so much of this relief work that we have been talking about in this series of conversations. He was not a famous author.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. As a pay-per-click marketer, now I will look at retail packaging as a source of ideas on landing page design. That’s 10x what many websites convert.

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VC Cafe

DECEMBER 1, 2015

So-called after the California Gold Rush where the purveyors of picks and shovels made a killing (whereas the outcome for prospectors was mixed), the picks and shovels of machine intelligence are hardware, data feeds, and (arguably) the algorithms themselves. It’s not uncharted territory?—?if Pick and Shovel’ plays.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 22, 2020

You can listen to our conversation on Apple , Google, or wherever you like to download podcasts. Here's my conversation with Lenore Estrada. We talked about how her background has made her well-suited for this kind of civic engagement, her relationship to the tech world, how she scaled the organization so quickly and much more.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) If you are outside of Silicon Valley, you ought to jump into them with both feet. You’ll learn a lot.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Beyond just those who will be hearing about the lean startup for the first time, Im expecting to shake a lot of hands and have a lot of interesting side conversations. Truth be told, we've got defense contractors here just like California does too. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

I might have pursued a humanities education at a “ kumbaya college ” in California, but it’s only human to be at least a little bit selfish! These managers have a tendency to steamroll conversations. Be sure to take each conversation in the direction of the specific job for which you are applying.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

You can listen to the conversation on the Greymatter podcast here. So the norms that we have were a combination of bottoms-up and then some top-down leaning. On the other side, we decided to lean into delivering in a big way, so we bought Postmates. Any company that leans too hard on M&A is going to start chasing dumb deals.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2012

One of the most important things we do with The Lean Startup Conference is make a livestream of the plenary talks available for free to groups around the world, supporting entrepreneurship communities everywhere. Past livestream attendees have reported great conversations and networking. They represent more than 10,000 people total.

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