Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

We hired union laborers to do that. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. What’s your advice about hiring sales/marketing folks? (I The same was true for the Product Marketing group.

Silicon Valley 263

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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.

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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. Theoretically, that’s why I hired them. You don’t delegate life and death.

Silicon Valley 124

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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. When I was at Intel, we hired the Hill Group to come in a train the entire team of sales and marketing people who were slated to staff any trade show booth throughout the year. You’ll never have to do it again.)

Silicon Valley 129

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.] You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.] You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.] Type and Sales Teams If you remember from a previous post, startups fall into four Types of Markets.

Silicon Valley 144

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Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 17, 2023

20:57] When talking about hiring, how do I look for somebody who naturally has that gift, whether they have a sales resume or not? [22:29] They're both longtime sales leaders, practitioners and professors of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. So let's go to hiring.

Sales 92

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

The department had hired a recruiter and was interviewing candidates from other chip companies. But Intel was kicking our rear. One day I heard there was an opening in the marketing department for a product marketing manager for the Z-8000 peripheral chips. Now all I needed to do was to learn what a marketeer was supposed to do.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. The labs basic research was done by graduate students or Ph.Ds

Silicon Valley 144

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

For example, some startup sales execs believe hiring the core sales team is a key objective. Some think that hiring a PR agency, starting the buzz and getting coverage in hot blogs or on the cover of magazines at launch are objectives. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing?

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Austin Startup

DECEMBER 20, 2020

Austin has been one the fastest growing cities in the country for the past 20 years that I’ve been here, but it feels like COVID-19 and California wildfires broke the floodgates already under pressure from high taxes and expensive real estate in landlocked coastal cities.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I believe it’s just like a family trait, which starts from the characteristics of the top C-level executives and cascades all the way down, from the type of mid-management they hire, to who the mid-management hires, and then the way everyone is supposed to walk and talk.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Engineering focuses on building the product; it designs the product, specifies the first release and hires a staff to build the product. Marketing starts to build a sales demo, writes sales materials (presentations, data sheets), and hires a PR agency.

Silicon Valley 263

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. In reality we hadn’t gotten any closer to our goal than the day we hired him. In fact, we would have been better off if we hadn’t hired him as we wouldn’t have confused a warm body with progress.

Silicon Valley 327

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Have a loud product demo; give away pieces of candy; hire a masseuse and offer free back rubs. Offer a free bestselling book in your industry (can you have the author there to autograph it?); Hold a contest, (If you’re giving away a big prize make sure your most valuable prospect wins.)

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship.

Lean 250

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

With that implicit assumption, startups hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies while marketing creates a brand and buzz to create demand and drive it into the sales channel (web, direct salesforce, etc.)

Customer Development 203

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. Two Jobs at Once When I was hired at Zilog part of the deal was that I could consult for the first six months for my last employer, ESL.

Silicon Valley 181

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

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. I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&# Driving across the U.S. I was stunned.

Agile 251

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

It got bigger by inventing new test and measurement equipment and it hired people who knew how to execute that strategy. Elephant Graveyard Reinvention of large companies, while making for great case studies are rare. For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

I made them a pretty good offer – hire me as a training instructor at the salary they were [.] Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] the type of training military maintenance people need, and I had done some informal teaching in the Air Force.

Silicon Valley 202

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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. Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based.

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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

JULY 2, 2009

In reality I had been hired as CEO and the adult supervision and administrative overseer of one of the most creative talents in the valley. A month later, after raising $4 million dollars (we literally had VC’s fighting over who else would fund us), Peter and I started our video game company, Rocket Science Games. We understood none of this.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Successful pinball companies didn’t hire Hollywood talent. Meanwhile our company was pouring an enormous amount of dollars into building tools and video compression technology, while also hiring a lot of high-priced Hollywood talent like art directors, and script and story editors. I know what’s great and what’s not.

Silicon Valley 212

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Berkonomics

DECEMBER 26, 2013

Dave’s Note: William Fisher is CEO of Quicksilver Software, a software and Internet game development company in Southern California. We’re successful because we specialize in “hard problems” but not in any one vertical market. I hire people who are eager to do new things and work hard not to become obsolete.

Southern California 75

Southern California Offshore Silicon Valley Vertical 75

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. 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.

Silicon Valley 279

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. Reply Jerry Ji , on May 15, 2009 at 4:56 pm Said: When my startup starts hiring, I’ll make “The Four Steps to the Epiphany&# a prerequisite reading for every interviewer.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

And I had hired and fired two people who didn’t work out. 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. Like everything else, you don’t hire a chief diversity officer and say, “Great, sit there and give speeches.”It’s

Iran 39

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

And it hires very smart people from the best schools. BTW, by the standards mentioned in the Times article, the following people would never have been interviewed or hired at Google. Google is looking to hire workers. I love Google. I think its one of the smartest companies out there. And founders don’t apply for jobs.

Silicon Valley 329

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2009

my hotel room was stacked with the journals and textbooks about each vertical market just to keep up with the people we were meeting. (I We’re glad your company hired a real petroleum engineer to come speak to us. As I traveled to some of the most arcane trade shows and conferences ( AIAA , SPE , MSC , etc.),

Silicon Valley 138

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. In my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Whitney Company by writing a personal check for $5M and hiring Benno Schmidt as the first partner (Schmidt turned Whitney’s description of “private adventure capital&# into the term “venture capital”). set up companies to do just that – find and formalize investments in new and emerging industries. In 1946 Jock Whitney started J.H.

Silicon Valley 163

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Reid Hoffman

JULY 13, 2021

Too often, the unintended negative impacts of AI – such as racial, gender or socioeconomic bias in AI tools for hiring, housing, or legal assistance – aren’t understood until after its implementation. There’s no doubt about it. And I was very thankful to have that sabbatical experience at Google and seeing that. So I’m just very excited.

Technical Review 36

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Reid Hoffman

JULY 13, 2021

Too often, the unintended negative impacts of AI – such as racial, gender or socioeconomic bias in AI tools for hiring, housing, or legal assistance – aren’t understood until after its implementation. There’s no doubt about it. And I was very thankful to have that sabbatical experience at Google and seeing that. So I’m just very excited.

Technical Review 36

Technical Review Artificial Inteligence America Algorithm 36

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Reply Jarek , on February 27, 2011 at 11:51 pm said: What about CRM?

Software Review 110

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