Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

The company was founded to build games with embedded video to bring Hollywood stories, characters, and narratives to a market where “shoot and die” twitch games were in vogue. But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did.

Silicon Valley 221

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 233

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners.

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley RSS California Video 151

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

At a university business plan competition, for the first time they can swim in the sea of expertise that we/I take for granted in the middle of Silicon Valley. I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) I now think that was a mistake.

Business Plan 152

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 152

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– The First Valley IPO’s Silicon Valley first caught the eyes of east coast investors in the late 1950’s when the valleys first three IPO’s happened: Varian in 1956, Hewlett Packard in 1957, and Ampex in 1958.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley SBIC San Francisco RSS 128

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. has a large enough market that most U.S. ———-.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. 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.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.). Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) ———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. .

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 134

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market. 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.

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Silicon Valley Distribution Washington Channel 336

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it). On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. Unbounce online marketing blog. Distribution Hacks.

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API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

All teams struggle with finding product/market fit. Like all great Silicon Valley companies they started with a technology and guessed who the customers will be. The Customer Development process, this relentless drive to turn hypotheses into facts is what makes this learning so rapid. Massive pivot.

Lean 277

Lean Silicon Valley Customer Development Incubator 277

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. Ironically, the model is a good fit when launching a new product into an existing , well-defined market where the basis of competition is understood, and its customers are known.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

Software Review 110

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Here’s why. Electron-based Venture Capital.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 262

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

In Silicon Valley for three decades, spent eight years as a partner at US Venture Partners. She explained why: Magdalena : … you can have a fantastic idea, you can have a great team, you can have what you believe is a great market opportunity but you can die at the end so none of those are sufficient. Steve : Why?

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley California Entrepreneur Cofounder 141

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 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. What’s the distribution channel. How do we price and position the product?

Agile 335

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The goals were “first mover advantage,” “grab market share” and “get big fast.”

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

In Silicon Valley for three decades, spent eight years as a partner at US Venture Partners. She explained why: Magdalena : … you can have a fantastic idea, you can have a great team, you can have what you believe is a great market opportunity but you can die at the end so none of those are sufficient. Steve : Why?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley California Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. No building, no money, no customers, no market? These customer and market risks need to be translated into facts as soon as possible. Employ customer development.

Silicon Valley 231

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 231

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

I responded to their RFP by proposing that Ardent build the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center a distributed supercomputing environment with hundreds of Ardent personal supercomputers rather than a monolithic Cray supercomputer. Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 206

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Looking to create their accelerator/incubator, Wayne and seven other founders rented a Silicon Valley house together one summer. And a company culture and values need to be design and engineered just like the product. .

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know have they distribute their product?

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

MITX : Non-profit trade association hosting many events focused on digital marketing and internet business. Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Fiksu – Mobile App Marketing (backed by CRV). Jana – Mobile Marketing (Backed by Spark).

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.) car market.

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 175

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “ Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.”

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Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2010

The first time I taught the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship class, a quarter of the class were foreign students in a special engineering-entrepreneurship program where they took one entrepreneurship class each quarter at Stanford while working full time in technology startups in Silicon Valley. Lessons Learned.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Business Model Customer Development Engineer 127

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

I plan to apply these models to my own ventures, especially within new contexts separate from software and web development. The problem is that the most authentic innovators and entrepreneurs are in the Valley. I want more than anything to come to Silicon Valley after I graduate and join the vibrant ecosystem.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. A description of your target market or the different market segments you’re targeting. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Prior to Sorced, Elizabeth worked in business development at SecondMarket. The Alchemist Series: Customer Development and Metrics. Santa Clara, CA.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. Note that they plan a trip to San Diego to visit the customer. With a great assist from the State Departments innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.) If you can’t see the presentation click here.

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San Diego Metrics Indonesia Silicon Valley 145