Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. Convergent Technologies was one of those OEM suppliers. Their engineers hated us.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# Context here.)

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

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David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

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YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 9, 2013

And you can always take a cue from my favorite street hot dog vendor, whose most powerful marketing tool is his memory: He remembers each customer’s face along with their name and specific hot dog preferences. Yes, it’s true that customers aren’t always convenient. Today, though, technology has changed that model.

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Customer Technical Review Florida Cofounder 170

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

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SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

"Authentic" is dead - A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks , May 3, 2010 It's time to retire the following phrases. Putting customers first. Draw Your Ideas - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 16, 2010 I saw Jack Dorsey give this talk at The 99% Conference last month. Enjoyed this post? Stay Tuned.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

How To Come Up With A Value Proposition In A Crowed Market. It’s Not A Conversion Problem, It’s A Customer Development Problem. Think About Customer Experience, Not Just Conversion Optimization. Content & Co-marketing. Co-market with external vendors to promote new integrations (i.e

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Use the cloud and subscriptions for computing technology. Social media facilitates marketing and sales. Minimize investment in prototypes and tooling.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. His enthusiastic response was, “This will revolutionize marketing departments!”

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

A startup founder needs to never lose sight of the vision, but be extremely adaptable to pretty much everything else. And realizing your vision as a founder takes equal parts determination and flexibility. And realizing your vision as a founder takes equal parts determination and flexibility. Lots of people have visions.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

A startup founder needs to never lose sight of the vision, but be extremely adaptable to pretty much everything else. And realizing your vision as a founder takes equal parts determination and flexibility. And realizing your vision as a founder takes equal parts determination and flexibility. Lots of people have visions.

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Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 280

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2015

Phil Randazzo , is the founder of American Dream U , a national entrepreneurship and coaching program that helps transitioning soldiers find work or start their own business. Derek Andersen , is the founder of Startup Grind , a 200,000-person entrepreneurial community with chapters in 75 countries run by more than 1,000 volunteers.

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Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder Nevada 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) It was my ex boss from Convergent Technologies, “Steve we’ve all just resigned from Convergent and we’re starting a new company.

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 131

The Next Web

MARCH 11, 2014

Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt and EIR at Tradecraft. Even its founders couldn’t quite describe it, let alone foresee what it would become. With each one, they learn and invest in technology for their next idea. They didn’t do market research. Twitter is confusing. It wasn’t clear what [Twitter] was.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 Waves of technology platforms I still remember the first time I switched to LAMP. That startup didnt turn out so well, but not for lack of technology. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. 1 comments: flixsterwidgettest said.

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San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Founder Dialogues : Eric Paley plays talk show host on this recurring fireside chat style event that has featured Boston’s BEST founders. MITX : Non-profit trade association hosting many events focused on digital marketing and internet business. Boston Hardware Startup Meetup – Meetup organized by the founders of BOLT.

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same infrastructure tools they have used for the past 20+ years: Excel and recent college grads searching Google. According to Knowledge.VC , under 5% of US VCs have a full-time team member focused on technology. . But we’re doing it slowly.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. Her work included heading Nokia’s location-based services business and app portfolio for emerging markets, which she built from a back-of-a-napkin idea to a 100-person organization with over 10 million users.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

The Cinepak codec was written by the engineer who would become my cofounder at Rocket Science Games.) This is the first way to get video into a computer, we’re going to sell and market this board like there’s no tomorrow. People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

We as researchers go in with a bias – that obviously these guys want our technology – but that is not the case for a lot of customers. What you think about your technology is great, but at the end of the day you’re not the one buying it. Curt Haselton , co-founder and CEO of Haselton Baker Risk Group.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 196

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Andy Cunningham , founder and CEO of Cunningham Collective. Andy Cunningham. And download any of the past shows here.). Clips from their interviews are below.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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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. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Startups in Bend.

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2015

A month ago, Jason, one of my founder friends, shut down his startup. 1 rule every founder hears over and over: Nobody wants your product until you prove it. How come so many founders still wake up to this horrible truth, after months or years of hard work? Customer Development for us meant a lot of hard-won learnings.

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Cofounder Lean Customer Development Startup 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 30, 2014

The landscape for how to turn life science and health care technologies into viable companies has changed more in the last 3 years than in the last 30. But a new class of life science/healthcare co-working and collaboration space is another. A new life science/healthcare co-working and collaboration space.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Maybe It’s Me When I got to the SuperMac, our Marketing Communications group told me about our “award-winning&# retail packaging for our graphics boards. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it. Yet when I saw our retail package, I was confused. Worry about the sales results.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. Its to everyones advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. Even VCs do it.

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San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

We as researchers go in with a bias – that obviously these guys want our technology – but that is not the case for a lot of customers. What you think about your technology is great, but at the end of the day you’re not the one buying it. Curt Haselton , co-founder and CEO of Haselton Baker Risk Group.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Heres my take.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The question was: what did the founders want to do? Will Harvey , Eric Ries and the other founders were unequivocal – “Screw the buy-out, we’re here to build a company. One founder quit and joined Google.) Go For Broke. The Scalable Startup.

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