Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Part 3: Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster. Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. x86 , ARM.)

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. billion U.S.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

Partnered with engineering trying to understand what customers really wanted, needed and would pay for, versus what we could actually build and deliver (and learning the difference between a simply good engineer and working in the presence of sheer genius.) Great careers start by peeling potatoes.

Thailand 331

Thailand Engineer Customer Development SEO 331

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Over the quarter, teams of students would put the theory to work, using these tools to get out of the building and talk to customer/partners, etc.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

Or, if you can’t skip a round, when should you try to work extra hard to minimize dilution and when should you be prepared to take more dilution for the right partner/situation? Also, the benefit of raising a pre-seed from great partners probably outweighs the cost. Founders with limited experience.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

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. And our course advisor, Tom Byers , Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP.

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

And along with that first customer hypothesis I had the brilliant hypothesis that my channel partner should be Onyx. I left with enough code so our engineers could get started immediately. Onyx gave us an engineering contact and he helped our team make sense of their system. But I didn’t realize that at the time.

Seattle 259

Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 259

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

the teams spent the last two weeks learning what activities, resources and partners they would need to actually deliver their solution. Second: I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here. Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), The Left side of the Canvas.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was an aggressive, young and a very tactical VP of marketing at Ardent , a supercomputer company – who really hadn’t a clue about the relationship between profound beliefs, customer discovery and strategy. I was a great marketer.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Back then, an entrepreneur used a serial product development process that proceeded step-by-step with little if any customer feedback. The goal of Build-Measure-Learn is not to build a final product to ship or even to build a prototype of a product, but to maximize learning through incremental and iterative engineering.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Eric Ries co-founded Catalyst Recruiting while attending Yale, and continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com. Taking My Class. Hear Eric explain what they learned.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2013

I pointed out that the “data” you gather in 10 weeks (talking to 100+ customers, partners, payers, etc.,) Now that you’ve gotten to know your potential channel and customers, regardless of how much money you’re going to make, will you enjoy working with these customers for the next 3 or 4 years? ——– 1.

Cofounder 325

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Liquidity Event Lean 325

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory – income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models, 5-year forecasts, etc. billion U.S.

Engineer 278

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 278

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: [link] There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." STAY #500STRONG ON THE INTERWEBS OUR STARTUP LOVIN' PARTNERS. We're back!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. This can be a surprisingly difficult zone to become profitable in, because the sales and marketing motions and engineering costs are the same as for much larger sales, but without the attendant revenue.

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

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 305

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

Companies pursuing innovation can Buy, Build, Partner or use Open Innovation. 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.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. His investing career started 15 years ago at Apax Partners and continued with Trident Capital.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

If you’re a venture capitalist … you have limited partners that give you money to invest on their behalf, and you’re responsible for giving them outsize returns. As an entrepreneur, you’re always fighting that external war whether that’s with partners or with investors. Nayeem : (Nods.) You have your team.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

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. Having a teaching partner makes life a lot easier and the class improves. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner.

Business Model 226

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 226

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He Max and his partners interviewed and analyzed over 650 early-stage Internet startups. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

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.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

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. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. Teaches you how to use Customer Development to test it. Integration with Customer Development and Lean Startup.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

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. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

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. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

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. Founders Pad.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The Agora team decided to formalize the customer discovery process by coming up with a set of Customer Discovery principles and questions that were as good as any I’ve seen. They had 16 interviews with target customers (Zynga, Yahoo, VMware, Walmart, Zeconder, etc.) The Business Model Canvas is a great way to diagram it out.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. A Five-sided Market.

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). One of the goals of the class is to talk to 100 customers and partners.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. Greylock Partners. You can register for the survey here. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

The Yin and Yang of Product and Engineering - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 22, 2010 For a tech company, product and engineering are the heart and soul of the business. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. This is a great configuration for a starting team. Here’s why. Your Process Doesn’t Work.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost. As a bonus it meant the 1,400 aerial applicator companies could be a potential distribution channel partner. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Technology.

Customer 316

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 316