Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

We’ll sell them the CDROM drives as well.” (The Kodak CDROM drives were the size of professional audio equipment and depending on the model, costing $600-$1000 in today’s dollars.) (And Newer versions will ride the technology wave of lighter, and cheaper versions. launched a product in 1990 called PhotoCD.

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SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

Hopefully everyone understands that in technology companies, continuous innovation is not an option. ” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise.” Or they continue to turn out more features that don’t make a difference.

Product 91

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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. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

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.

Entrepreneur 167

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# Reply Lots of low cost experiments « Open Ambition , on April 22, 2009 at 8:58 am Said: [.] That’s why startups are agile.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. No, not really.

Silicon Valley 157

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.” Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Prior to founding Keen Home , Nayeem Hussain spent his career focusing on M&A, corporate development/strategy, and financial analysist, first at Prudential Financial and then at Loral Space & Communications. Over the past decade, he has launched multiple businesses, including three technology companies.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

Customer 154

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”. The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”. The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen.

Lean 182

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” his next article on SuperMac, “Building the Killer Team – Mission, Intent, and Values&# , Steve further pounds the table on some principles of leadership that I think are [.] But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. That kind of accountable. It became [.]

Silicon Valley 269

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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. At ESL Military Intelligence Was No Longer an Oxymoron Perry not only took his best managers, but he also took his customers, and his desire to build a company culture that was the antithesis of working for a phone company.

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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.” I ran back to the company and said customers had told us, “We have to do both little and big endian.” And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

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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

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.) Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 143

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development. It comes as no surprise as technology today enables companies to prove product-market fit much earlier in their lifecycles. Now practically everyone is getting involved in Series A.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 203

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Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

The first barrier to innovation is the Horizon 1 leadership conundrum. The same is true in most DOD/IC organizations: leadership has been promoted through the ranks for their ability to execute existing programs/missions. In the DOD/IC innovation is often more technology, more planes, more aircraft carriers, more satellites, etc.

San Diego 145

San Diego Metrics Indonesia Silicon Valley 145

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

Vertical 137

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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. Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) + The Customer Development… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent.

North Carolina 160

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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. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product? We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation. It didn’t help that “innovation” was the new hot-button buzzword from senior leadership, and incubators were sprouting in every division of their company, it just made their job more unmanageable.

Incubator 317

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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.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

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

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Clips from their interviews are below: Wayne Sutton is a partner and co-founder of BUILDUP VC , a Bay Area non-profit that connects, mentors, and educates underrepresented technology entrepreneurs. Not just a problem in terms of access to technology. (It’s Their first product aims to make meetings more productive.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.)

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 239

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America? Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 267

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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. link] [link] I guess you could call it the “Continuous Wave Radio&# technology period. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C. Who would have known?

Silicon Valley 297

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder?

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