Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Simulation to Reduce Invention Risk If you’re in a vertical where “invention risk” is dominant, then you want to do everything you can to manage and reduce those risks. When I wrote the Four Steps to the Epiphany , the Customer Development text, I hadn’t yet thought about what vertical markets it might be appropriate for.)

Vertical 135

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 135

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 26, 2019

California retains its rank as one of the most desirable states to live in, despite untenable property prices, high taxes, and a cornucopia of social issues. California homeowners are selling up and moving East, to neighboring states. California’s loss is Nevada and Arizona’s gain. In San Francisco, that figure is $1.4

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Oakland Developer California 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes. This is basic enough that I don’t think anyone can argue with it – reduce the cost of mistakes.

Venture Capital 234

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 234

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

FEBRUARY 13, 2013

Steve Jobs once challenged Obama to find him 30,000 engineers so he could build a plant in California. It wasn’t like we were packaging software we were producing the highest performing vertical axis wind turbine. She’s also a professor at the University of Cincinnati in their Engineering department.

Technical Review 102

Technical Review Engineer United States Government 102

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Reply Lots of low cost experiments « Open Ambition , on April 22, 2009 at 8:58 am Said: [.] Reply Killing Innovation with Corner Cases and Consensus « Steve Blank , on April 22, 2009 at 5:04 am Said: [.] “Speed and Tempo&# – Fearless Decision Making for Startups [.]

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. There are serious negative trade-off costs with using reflex designs but compared to the economic costs of each vacuum tube, it was a justified trade-off.

Silicon Valley 294

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 294

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

The Startup Death Spiral: The Cost of Getting Product Launch Wrong By the time of first customer ship, if a startup does not understand its market and customers, failure unfolds in a stylized ritual, almost like a Japanese Noh play.

Customer Development 232

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 232

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

At first only the national laboratories and the largest companies could afford to buy supercomputers, (the Cray-1 cost ~$9 million) but over time scientists and researchers were also starting to use them.

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 163

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.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 206

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 140

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Thanks for sharing the lessons you’ve learned, especially the ones where the cost is measured in years. If you are entrepreneur with a solid business that actually makes money you would know that VC has the highest cost of capital imaginable and would find better options.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Therefore, no, we weren’t really equipped to be the low cost provider. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? No, not really. And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 153

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

We can put both little- and big-endian in the chip, and it won’t cost us more than 1,000 gates.” I ran back to the company and said customers had told us, “We have to do both little and big endian.” The reaction from the chip circuit design guys was, “OK, we could do that. The reaction from our software guys was a little less kind. “Are

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. This was just before the IBM PC hit the desktop so there were no “standard” operating systems or applications for desktop platforms.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Your best bet is probably taking an existing market and serving a portion of it better than the competition, through lower cost or a different set of features. Don’t spend time and money on getting the word out about your product beyond what you need to do discovery and validation. End of theory.&#

Customer Development 227

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 227

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Waiting for images to move around the screen were not only driving them crazy, but costing them money. The good news was that the Spif strategy was working; the bad news is that it was costing the company our entire profit. And by more than anything, I mean that the word performance came up time and again from these professionals.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 282

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

customers aren’t buying it, the cost of distribution is too high, etc.) Not testing these hypotheses upfront is a fundamental and, in many cases, fatal error most startups make. Because it isn’t until after first customer ship that a startup discovers that their initial hypotheses were simply wrong (i.e.

Customer Development 243

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

And while we feel a bit uncomfortable, we still engage because the cost of non participation is currently higher than the price of privacy. A local example was the Greenhouse pop up restaurant in Melbourne by Joost Baker – Which included vertical gardens and large amounts of material re-purposing. This might just change.

Uruguay 123

Uruguay Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 123

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. That kind of accountable.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

Video 180

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab.

Silicon Valley 190

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 190

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. Essentially, we decided that here’s this stuff that we’re going to do (which is mobility and delivery) through partnerships that would allow us to lower our cost base pretty significantly.

Iran 39

Iran Technical Review Non-Compete Lean 39

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

The San Diego-based startup has developed vertically integrated system that produces a plant-based protein ingredient that can replace egg whites, whey and casein in food and beverage applications. Be respectful, honest and transparent with people as you never know how much time, effort and energy it cost them to get where they are.

San Diego 62

San Diego Memphis AJAX Netherlands 62

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Are his costs in control? It’s a company that’s lost sight of the values that got it there. Don’t let it happen to you. Stay hungry, stay lean. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. Is the story over? The same principles operate in living as in business.

Silicon Valley 226

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 226

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.) This means they could fund other non-military academic programs from this overhead. The Stanford Applied Electronics Lab built prototypes which were handed off to the military labs for their evaluation.

Silicon Valley 152

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 152

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. We needed a way to shut down the German Air Defense system.

Silicon Valley 199

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 199

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. A contemporary analog to this type of vertical integration is Comcast/NBC-U. There are of course other outposts like Austin and Seattle.

Cofounder 277

Cofounder Merger Founder Venture Capital 277

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 11, 2009

I run a monthly meeting called the VCA that represents the majority of Southern California venture capital firms. Wacky, weird and low cost : Before diving into what I learned in the deck I want to share something crazy. couponing, vertical social networks, Internet TV, etc. My take aways are below: 1.

Asia 188

Asia Southern California China Japan 188

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Not enough people understand the emotional cost of being a start-up founder. My good friends and I lived in a house together working on 2 start-ups and we would call the house Sarajevo. Everyday, there was shrapnel that would come our way and you had no choice but to fight or let your dream die.

Entrepreneur 290

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 290

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager. the manager followed us still yelling.

Founder 308

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 308

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 157

North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 157

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 126

techcrunch.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Similarly, the bulk of the companies getting funding are still California-based. After Northern California and Southern California the biggest area of investment geographically was in international companies. The cost of money is steep, and only works in certain verticals, of which software is NOT one.

Venture Capital 62

Venture Capital Technical Review Sweat Equity Valuation 62

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget.

Silicon Valley 199

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 199