Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

(There is a huge difference between the Chinese who have never left and those who went to school abroad, even for a few months – at least a difference in their ability to relate to me and have a conversation on the same wavelength. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 215

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

” conversation with investors. (If The competitive diagram is how develop your first hypotheses about who your customers are. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. Customer Development Teaching Venture Capital'

Venture Capital 335

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 262

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

I use the Investment Readiness Level as part of my sessions to help the students understand that being ready for investment means that besides having a pretty PowerPoint, they need to do real work and show Customer Development progress. Since I began incorporating the Investment Readiness Level framework I’ve made three observations.

Sacramento 306

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. And the converse is true; Palm would have failed, burning through all their cash, using Handspring’s strategy.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas ( activities, resources , partners , and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”. This post is a continuation of the series.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

Technology 138

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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.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. We were painting a picture of hypertext on every desktop computer. The response from across the country?

North Carolina 125

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Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Comments, help, suggestions and conversation can happen 24/7.

Silicon Valley 281

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Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2014

This leads to two key points: Point 1: You have to fight – and win- on two fronts (both outside and inside), in order to succeed in corporate venturing. One memorable example of this was Xerox’s internal venture capital fund, Xerox Technology Ventures (XTV). As Steve would say, this is a big idea.

Startup 327

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The Trojan Horse “Well…” I said hesitantly, “I’m not sure we should share this with you but we have a set of benchmarks that we use to measure performance….” Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. The first month of customer discovery for most of their initiatives relied too much on conversations within the Princeton University community itself (fellow students, faculty and admin). Let the games begin …. ” Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

I would say that in the last five or six years, it’s gone from a weird conversation to have to if you’re not having it, you’re not in the mainstream anymore. It’s a conversation. Steve : I’m going to remind everybody that no is just the beginning of a conversation for an entrepreneur ….

Artificial Inteligence 120

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

We had some great conversations in the car, but one stuck in my mind. Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/09/28/unintended-lessons – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born. Our conversation went like this: Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported? When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

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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?

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 15, 2011

The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development" ; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. What Does This Change?

Silicon Valley 118

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Storm Clouds - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 12, 2010 We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. Competing To Win Deals - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 7, 2010 The venture capital business is highly competitive.

Technical Review 175

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Now I mention this conversation not because the objection was dumb, but because objections like these happen all the time when you’re brainstorming. Customer Development.) And when you are brainstorming you really do want to hear all ideas and all possible pitfalls.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2019

The cycle of creative destruction of the old being replaced by the new continues, fueled by angel and venture capital. Then follow up the Petal Diagram with another slide that says, here’s our unique insight that’s been validated by customer discovery. When you’re describing the future, most of them are remembering the past.

Bandwidth 281

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. From there, the conversation took a different trajectory. Anybody else got some other ideas?&# It was definitely a “Zen moment&# for me in terms of my career. True? .&#

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Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2010

One of the best ways to get a debate going into the entrepreneurial world is to throw the “Nature versus Nurture” hand-grenade into a conversation. The conversation then goes into making the case whether these can be taught or you’re born with them. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

Silicon Valley 219

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2018

20:10: Customer Development is an art. 37:34: Customer Discovery isn’t just a bunch of random conversations. 39:03: Mistakes that blow a customer meeting. 42:45: How you know you’ve talked to enough customers. It’s worth a listen. 7:54: How we used to build startups.

Rhode Island 30

Rhode Island Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 30

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So I generally feel right at home in these conversations. We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 113

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure. Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. to compete. You’ll learn a lot.

Business Plan 140

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

And I started to panic as it dawns on me that this conversation is occurring 30 times the 300 people in each of the 30 squadrons on this airbase. But that was the cue for 10 more people simultaneously to burst out with questions, (“How about motorcycles will they be OK? Can we go to the bathroom when the gravity is turned off?”)

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Ryan Chan, founder at UpKeep said, “We created an LLC at first, but after realizing that we wanted to take on venture capital, we decided to move to a Delaware C corp.”. venture capital. Seek out venture capital funding. 17 Venture Capital Blogs You Should Be Reading. or even be a U.S.

Software Review 74

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

thought it would be helpful to put some of my thoughts into a blog post and hopefully spur some conversation in the comments and over email. The Expanding Birthrate Of Web Startups - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , August 22, 2010 There is a general consensus that web startups are being created at a faster rate than ever.

Startup 191

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David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. mentor VCs, e.g., most VCs.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950′s/’60′s where was the money coming from? After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

So conversion rate percentage, of course it can always be higher and we’re doing a lot of stuff to make that higher, but it’s in line with other applications. Jason: Yeah, one percent conversion rate is pretty normal. I’ve had some very good conversations with a large insurance company. So on the one hand.

Technical Cofounder 220

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It was always a welcome change of pace to leave the brown of the unchanging desert and travel into town and have dinner with them and have a non-technical conversation about books, theater, politics, travel, etc. Her husband would look at me out the corner of his eyes and then we’d segue the conversation to some other topic.

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