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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. Their leadership has shown incredible foresight in engineering an amazing economic engine and formidable military. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

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China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Yet in our case the product, the machine as delivered from engineering, was a blank, featureless computer with just an operating system and compilers. In most other companies a product-marketing department was responsible for the pricing, positioning and promotion of the product.

Engineer 221

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits. tags: vc entrepreneurship) [.]

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. “Oh No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. Oh yes, company X, they’re having problem 343.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2014

Business and Operations Models – How to describe, design, challenge, and evaluate innovation. Innovation Leadership – How to develop innovative teams and culture. For example, a subset of the class self organized around how to better service businesses starting and operating in the city.

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Government Philadelphia Lean Customer Development 307

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. 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 [.]

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

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. Teten: How is the corporate VC model evolving: in how they interact with portfolio companies or the operating side of their organization? They used to come in at series B and later.

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Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. Believably promote your product. Close the sale.

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Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.) Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 10) Leadership. 8) Organization.

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Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

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. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. What’s Different. Entrepreneurs in Bend.

Silicon Valley 317

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 317

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Reply bjorn , on March 23, 2009 at 5:18 pm Said: these stories really livened up the whole concept of “customer discovery&# for me. It reminded me of “earlier days&# , when I was just starting out in running business operations for startups. i have your book, but stopped at the 4th chapter.

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Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 147

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART , the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Mass TLC Unconference: Large annual conference put on by the MA Technology Leadership Council. Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Dog Patch Labs – Shared workspace operated by Polaris Ventures. Entrepreneurial Development Firms. Next major event?

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

So I started to read all I could find on the development of microwaves. All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. A Stanford professor was at Harvard in World War II because the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development thought Terman was the best radio engineer in the country.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2018

Much of the writing on startups focuses on two elements: finding product-market fit scaling the company once #1 is accomplished For product-market fit, we have a lot of source material to work with from the last decade: Steve Blank’s leadership on Customer Development , and Eric Ries’ on the Lean Startup ?—?along and they will.

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Warrant Bootstrapping Framework Hiring 48

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Sloan transferred responsibility down from corporate into each of the operating divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac). One guy really did all of this.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. At least it succeeded in not distracting the developers. Engineering continually felt overwhelmed. What went wrong here? An Innovation Process and Pipeline.

Incubator 317

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 317

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?

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The Embrace infant warmer was developed - by getting out of the country -- and how Rob Emrich learned and scaled his non-profit, Road of Life. BetaBrand building apparel MVPs and testing them quickly with targeted customer communities. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category.

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Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

JULY 14, 2015

Leadership buy-in is actually not a big issue. The biggest struggle is actually to get the buy-in of middle management — of the people who do the operational work, have huge to do lists, have daily tasks — to get them to adopt a new innovation mindset. … What Are the Surprises When You Work With Big Companies?

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Channel Business Model Cofounder Business Plan 120

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google 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 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you.

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Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 185

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. But its not very open, and not very programmable, unless you have an expensive Mac and an approved developer license. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 27, 2015

—– In a recent workshop with a large company focused on the Innovation@50x process, I mentioned that founders and intraprenuers operate more like artists than accountants – on day one they see something no one else does. Startup founders operate in chaos and uncertainty. Customer Development. Pixar

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Founder Lean Hawaii Incubator 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. Do the right thing.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 127

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Ownership and Teamwork not turf. True? .&#

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Conduct client development interviews. Much like our digital PR offering, we started with a lean operation: We used Google Sheets to manage content operations across all accounts, along with dashboards that each client had access to. Image source ).

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

And how do they motivate their most important asset – their people – to operate with speed, urgency, and passion? This meeting was a biannual gathering of all the leadership involved in the corporate-wide initiatives to out-innovate their new disruptors. It was an amazing display of organizational esprit de corps.

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Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 397

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). You can get away with effective behavior in a large company. Ideas anyone,? Conversion ideas?

Silicon Valley 331

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 331

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Now the Soviets had first hand knowledge of how their air defense systems would work against the nuclear armed B-52G and H models in an operational environment. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. 23 to Ann Arbor when the leaves turned in the fall.

Silicon Valley 224

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 224

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

military had to develop new ways to collect intelligence. political leadership with a much bigger picture. They developed the National Intelligence Estimate – a series of reports which summarized their judgment about the size of the Russian threat. Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?)

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Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 173