Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

Although the class was run completely online, and even though they were suffering from Zoom fatigue, the 10 teams of 42 students collectively interviewed 1,142 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. Team Fleetwise – Vehicle Fleet Management. All the presentations are worth a watch.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Fear of Failure.

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Todd Branchflower took my Lean LaunchPad class having been entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. True to his word, fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching computer engineering at the Air Force Academy. ——-.

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Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 268

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “customers’” contracts funded the company.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

The Energy Storage division is acting like a startup, and Prescott Logan its General Manager, has lived up to the charter. He’s as good as any startup CEO in Silicon Valley. GE’s performance in implementing Customer Development gives lie to the tale that only web startups can be agile. So why this post?

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Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 237

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title “the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley”. We were going to be guessing.

North Carolina 131

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

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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. Why It’s “Silicon” Valley. ———-.

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Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), Four decades ago my first job in Silicon Valley was with ESL, the first company to combine computers and signals intelligence. The founder of this 1964 Silicon Valley startup was Bill Perry. The Left side of the Canvas.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 2, 2010

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. product managers in a startup can either be an asset or an albatross. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Silicon Valley Management San Francisco Product 265

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

Second, doing customer discovery via video actually increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. The eight teams spoke to over 945 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, warfighters, legal, security, customers, etc. He runs H4X Labs.

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Oakland Asia Lean Video 313

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 184

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

AUGUST 7, 2017

The interviewer, Curt Nickisch was great and managed to get me to summarize several years of learning in one podcast. 5:18 Why entrepreneurship thrived in Silicon Valley. 11:20 Steve Jobs on Customer Development. 12:38 The first time I did customer discovery. 11:20 Steve Jobs on Customer Development.

Silicon Valley 220

Silicon Valley Boston Lean Government 220

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves.

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Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 295

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. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. What’s Different.

Silicon Valley 317

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 317

Steve Blank

JUNE 21, 2017

I was in Boston and was interviewed by The Growth Show about my current thinking about innovation in companies and government agencies.The interviewer was great and managed to get me to summarize several years of learning in one podcast. 6:22 What’s Customer Development. 7:11 Agile Engineering – Eric Ries.

Silicon Valley 252

Silicon Valley Lean Government Boston 252

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

If you read only one previous post, read this one (or this one.) ————- The Birth of Entrepreneurship in The Hot Cold War Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was born in the middle of a secret war with the Soviet Union. While officially in the electrical engineering department, the lab reported directly to Terman.

Silicon Valley 173

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 173

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. Called “ How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad ,” it walks you through the Business Model Canvas and an overview of the customer development process. Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. Then it hit me – no one else wanted to be manager – what was the worst that could happen? And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

For our students, that can mean anyone from a Syrian refugee trying to make contact with his family back home, to a supply chain manager for a major apparel brand who wants to make sure his contract factory in Bangladesh doesn’t use forced labor. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

For our students, that can mean anyone from a Syrian refugee trying to make contact with his family back home, to a supply chain manager for a major apparel brand who wants to make sure his contract factory in Bangladesh doesn’t use forced labor. Christos Makridis, a Ph.D

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

In my last post I described my approach to one of the three classes I teach at Stanford in the engineering school: Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship. TA’s make managing 60 students working on cases and team projects manageable. Finally our TA’s managed the mentors we had supporting the students.

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 235

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

Silicon Valley 297

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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.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Its easy to take Silicon Valley for granted. Ive written a little bit about the origins of Silicon Valley because I think its important for us to understand how we got here in order to make sure we preserve what is best about our community. And do your customer development.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2013

Todd Branchflower was one of my Lean LaunchPad students entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. Fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching electrical engineering at the Air Force Academy. He promised that one day he would fix that.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Colorado Lean Connecticut 263

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

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. Silicon Valley, New York). The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Victor Hugo.

Silicon Valley 289

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 289

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Ajeet learned the ropes of enterprise startups at Aster Data Systems , where he was Senior Director of Product Management. Companies like MySpace and LinkedIn became some of our biggest customers. We tried to sell inside Silicon Valley, so these were all tech companies. We were mostly selling our product to engineers.

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Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 280