Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

On top of all this it was considered very bad form not to have at least four additional consecutive quarters of profits after an IPO.) The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down. billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales.

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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. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

My first IPO at Convergent. We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan. Marketing starts to build a sales demo, writes sales materials (presentations, data sheets), and hires a PR agency.

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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. It was still a year away from its IPO. I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

These IPOs meant that technology companies didn’t have to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid. Interestingly enough, Fred Terman, Dean of Stanford Engineering was tied to all three companies. The McMicking’s bought 50% of Ampex for $365,000 (some liken this to the first VC investment in the valley.)

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