Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.) Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. 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. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. It was fun watching it happen.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly.

Silicon Valley 203

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Entrepreneurs in Bend. Founders Pad.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Sloan transferred responsibility down from corporate into each of the operating divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac). One guy really did all of this.

Silicon Valley 179

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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. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

Silicon Valley 206

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. (In

Silicon Valley 269

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. Do the right thing.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Ownership and Teamwork not turf. True? .&#

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Now the Soviets had first hand knowledge of how their air defense systems would work against the nuclear armed B-52G and H models in an operational environment. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. 23 to Ann Arbor when the leaves turned in the fall.

Silicon Valley 224

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

political leadership with a much bigger picture. They developed the National Intelligence Estimate – a series of reports which summarized their judgment about the size of the Russian threat. Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?) How many did they have? How would they reach the U.S.?

Silicon Valley 173

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). You can get away with effective behavior in a large company.

Silicon Valley 331

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” Let me know what you think.

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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. “And, oh by the way, can you write the manuals for the operators while you’re at it.&# As I poured over the system schematics, I figured out how to put together a course to teach system theory, operations and maintenance.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards.

Silicon Valley 297

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. The same principles operate in living as in business. A VERY nice office. Are his costs in control?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

While both Stanford and MIT encouraged commercially oriented research and courted federal research contracts in the postwar years, MITs leadership focused on building relations with government agencies and seeking financial support from established electronics producers. What is customer development?

Silicon Valley 68

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. And when I wasn’t reading, I was also teaching operations which gave me a pretty good understanding of what we were looking for on the other side.

Silicon Valley 278

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Navy and the CIA were the primary collectors of tactical and operational ELINT on the Soviet PVO Strany Air Defense system. ELINT Tasking The ELINT program sought answers to operational questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? During the 1950′s, the U.S. The NSA owned COMINT collection.)

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2012

We believe our Departments play an essential leadership role in the design and implementation of online offerings. However, we also want to provide guidance and support and ensure that campus goals are met, specifically ensuring that our online education efforts align with our mission, values and operational requirements.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

The Beginnings – “Vacuum Tube Valley&# Ecosystem circa 1950 From its founding in 1946 Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) did basic research into vacuum tubes that could operate at microwave frequencies. The research was funded and paid for by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and later by the Air Force and Army.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. However, I think if I had understood the basics of Customer Development I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement. When I moderated my behavior it was when they were my startups.) I looked at my kids and never went back.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

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SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

recently did a lecture at a Babson MBA summer class on Entrepreneurial Leadership. California Milk Processor Board) – 1993. You Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Talk To Your Own Customers - Austin Startup , July 12, 2010 Andy Meadows is the founder and CEO of Bearhug , an Austin-based customer engagement platform launching today.

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