Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In theory when you went public, everyone’s shares were now tradable on the stock exchange, but usually the underwriters required a six month “lockup” when company insiders (employees and investors) couldn’t sell. Or were they trained and raised in the bubble and M&A hype and still looking for some shortcut to liquidity?

Silicon Valley 233

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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. Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F.

Agile 263

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. The idea of intention is that if employees understand the thinking behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 268

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building. The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. It’s natural for a company (and an individual employee) to take less risks once they have assets to protect. Perhaps it is better to shed employees instead, virtualize and outsource?

Silicon Valley 226

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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. Reply Dave Goulden , on April 2, 2009 at 9:55 am Said: Thanks for the great stories!

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

As in a startup, listening to customers is paramount for a big company’s innovation efforts, he added: If it’s an individual, if it’s a company, they all have a point of view and I always assume that they’re acting in good faith and they’re telling me what they really think. Filed under: Customer Development.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

A partner allows me the flexibility to miss a session or two (my job as a California Coastal Commissioner meets three days every month up and down the coast of California.) While that’s gratifying, the fact is that most people are ill suited to survive in the wild as founders or early employees.

Business Model 235

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. If you work 100-hour weeks, no one (investors, co-founders, employees) can blame you if things don’t work out, right?

Entrepreneur 290

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If your don’t have enough employees on the payroll, hire relatives, friends, or part-timers and train them. Where can I read about the training to give for employees who will be at a booth? You’ll never have to do it again.) Everyone should understand your goals, your messages, your demos and your theme and know their role.

Silicon Valley 134

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The close tie between the two labs was a unique aspect of the Stanford Lab.

Silicon Valley 152

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. And in particular I’m not suggesting that every employee who joins a startup fits this profile, it just seems more prevalent in the founder(s). Nor am I suggesting that everyone who does so turns out well.

Founder 308

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. I ultimately answered that call, joining Sun Microsystems with a 3-digit employee number. Had not yet heard of Silicon Valley at the time, but the siren call was already sounding.

Silicon Valley 199

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2019

An adjunct is a non- tenure track , part-time employee. I’ve been an adjunct for almost 18 years, and I still remember the onboarding process at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. See here for what that would look like.). It’s Been A Trip.

Cofounder 151

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. On my view, the best students (and employees) are the ones that are there for the enjoyment of the process. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 332

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Therefore the best way to keep your company alive is to instill in every employee a decisive mindset that can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 182

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 182

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

Silicon Valley 196

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Here I was, a very junior employee of ESL, a company with its hands in the heart of our Cold War strategy. Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978.

Silicon Valley 276

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

A week later as our employees came up the elevator there was a Lucite case on a pedestal with a single grey rock, lit with a single spotlight, on a velvet pillow. And it was much, much better than a space suit. In front of it was a brass plaque that read: “ Moon rock, Apollo 18, July 1973 – Copernicus Crater.”

Silicon Valley 135

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Reply steveblank , on September 16, 2009 at 7:00 pm said: Greg, The Google Group “Lean Startup Circle&# at [link] is a wonderful repository of Customer Development/Lean Startup success and failure. It’s more reference material. Thus, these pages. I’ll add more as time goes on. Can we touch base on this.

Software Review 110

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. Sergey Brin once said, “Instead of having our employees in large buildings, we could have several thousand houses each with a garage – there’s nothing stopping us from doing that.”

Silicon Valley 182

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. But besides being morally wrong, in the end they come back to bite you big time. Think about the baseball Steroid scandal, Tour de France doping scandal, housing bubble, etc.) Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Meanwhile on the West Coast – “The Group” 1950’s When Ampex was raising its money, in 1952, an employee of Fireman’s Fund in San Francisco, Reid Dennis , managed to put $20,000 in the deal. government would invest three (up to $300,000.) So for every dollar that a fund invested, it would have four dollars to invest.

Silicon Valley 128

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

Customers disliked this two-step process in early testing, and so Carol’s team built a version of the app that ran entirely on mobile, and was a one-stop-shop for tax preparation. Even then, they were careful to test the new app in a limited context, launching it first only in California, and only on a limited category of tax filers.

Lean 166

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 130

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Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

We are starting to see some doctors who are licensed to practice in California live abroad in Bali and partake in telemedicine – can we do more of this to help with patient loads from state to state and perhaps get more doctors certified in multiple states? Work: The workplace is changing a LOT.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco California Cost Software 48

Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

We are starting to see some doctors who are licensed to practice in California live abroad in Bali and partake in telemedicine – can we do more of this to help with patient loads from state to state and perhaps get more doctors certified in multiple states? Work: The workplace is changing a LOT.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco California Cost Software 48

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. BambooHR - Employee Records, Benefit Information, Payroll Data, etc. California Israel Chamber of Commerce. Customer Development. Read post Why Learning should be your top 2013 new year’s resolution  for a full list. Codeacademy. Lean Methodology Sources.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53