Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

I Know A Great Customer. As other startups were quickly automating all the department of large corporations (SAP-manufacturing, Oracle-finance, Siebel and Onyx-Sales) our first thought was that our company was going to automate enterprise-marketing departments. I left with enough code so our engineers could get started immediately.

Seattle 260

Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 260

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

—— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Ironically one of the things that’s holding back the Finnish cluster is Tekes , the government organization for financing research, development and innovation in Finland. 9-to-5 Venture Capital.

Finland 325

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 325

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. I heard from a few investors that as the startup ecosystem is relatively new, there’s a battle for experienced engineering talent and lack of experienced C-level execs. Fear of Failure.

China 324

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 324

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

Engineer 307

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 307

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Lean is The Engine for the Ambidextrous Organization. Fast forward to today. We can adapt these startup tools for use inside the corporation.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. I heard from a few investors that as the startup ecosystem is relatively new, there’s a battle for experienced engineering talent and lack of experienced C-level execs. Fear of Failure.

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Here’s the punchline: if you run your company as if you have closed a VC equity financing round even though you actually closed a convertible debt round, you’ll be in much better shape when it comes time to raise your Series A financing. Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Prior to founding Carely , Michael Eidsaune earned his MBA in finance and spent several years in investment management, eventually earning his level 1 CFA certification.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 143

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Prior to founding Carely , Michael Eidsaune earned his MBA in finance and spent several years in investment management, eventually earning his level 1 CFA certification.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole Customer Development processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. Many people at a young startup are trying to manage their finances like the rest of their user base.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

Vertical 147

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Search 322

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany."

Finland 158

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Second, the leaders of these companies tended to be those who excelled at finance, supply chain or production. For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs. Risk capital has provided financing for new ideas in the form of startups.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I also knew our customers. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. As part of the sales organization, I thought I kind of figured out what the function of the sales department was. (In

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress. a language corporate innovation groups can use to communicate to business units and finance. Entrepreneurs should always communicate their business’ very latest stage of customer development as part of their investor presentation.

Sacramento 308

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 308

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. The finance system didn’t talk to the sales system which didn’t know the manufacturing system even existed. All the Data and Not a Drop to Think.

San Francisco 229

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 229

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. Recently, the financing of innovation in medical devices has collapsed even further with most Class III devices simply unfundable. Life Sciences II – Medical Devices. Regulatory Issues.

Startup 296

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 296

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. Go ahead and try it, then come back.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Raizlabs – Mobile Development. Intrepid – Mobile development. Extension Engine - Software engineering and design. Startup Institute – Practical training program to prepare you to join a startup.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. ——————– Engineering 245.

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship , an introduction to building a scalable startup. Accounting Basics and Multi-stage Finance. Yet every team did figure out how to conduct extensive out of building Customer Discovery. (By

Intellectual Property 234

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 234

rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

He argued that software engineers don’t finish what they start, and that you’re better off paying a technical person than partnering with one. He picked engineers who were technically-driven but not entrepreneurially-driven. He picked engineers who weren’t comfortable taking risks as great as he wanted to take.

Technical Cofounder 42

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Engineering Fractional CTO 42

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 313

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 313

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. For more on how this plays into the process of scaling up, see the Customer Creation stage of the customer development model.) But in the meantime, by iterating on their product with customers, they have a chance to get there on their own.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

They grow their business via profits or traditional bank financing. Their primary goal is a predictable revenue stream for the owner, with reasonable risk and reasonable effort and without the need to bring in world-class engineers and managers. Posted in Customer Development, Durant versus Sloan, Technology, Venture Capital.

Hockey Stick 284

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 284

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. There is no “right path” to success.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Business Model Customer Development Engineer 127

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 6, 2014

It detailed exactly what everyone was to do at every stage for every product, with instructions for every department ranging from hardware to software, and on to operations, finance, marketing, even the support teams that troubleshoot and repair the product after it goes to market.”

Product 84

Product Venture Capital Lean Finance 84

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

In another example, at GroupSpaces we use services from Recurly to power our subscription billing engine and Assistly to power our helpdesk, which helped us to get up and running within a day. Is there a junior or senior developer from a previous gig who will respect you for a previous role and be ready to build their own baby with you?

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

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 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is especially true when you think of a tech startup, where the first few hires are typically engineers/programmers. To make round numbers let's say you have 100,000 share outstanding and you give your lead engineer 1000. 1% is just not a lot. the better the startup will be. If we assume 5 year to a $100MM exit that's 250k.

Equity 41

Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

But all that investment in growth and sales force didn’t have a long-term payback, and the actual value of the product to small businesses wasn’t as high as claimed, even though the simplest of customer development reveals this fact (ask any restauranteur).

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

3) An experienced board brings an extensive network of customers, partners, help in recruiting, follow-on financing, etc. Yet while we’ve reinvented how startups build their companies , startup investors are still having board meetings like it’s the 19 th century. 1) It’s an obligation that came with the check. The Wrong Metrics.

Silicon Valley 292

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 292

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. Examples are Hollywood for movies, Milan for fashion, New York for finance and today, Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurship. The Torch Program is the worlds largest “lets engineer entrepreneurial clusters” experiment. Venture Guiding Fund.

Programming 280

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 280

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

3) An experienced board brings an extensive network of customers, partners, help in recruiting, follow-on financing, etc. Yet while we’ve reinvented how startups build their companies , startup investors are still having board meetings like it’s the 19 th century. 1) It’s an obligation that came with the check. The Wrong Metrics.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 263

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

And in comes the Google App Engine as Google's offering in this context. Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. Building new apps is also not as simple. Enter OrangeScape. Photo by ilco. Discuss.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114