SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Draw Your Ideas - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 16, 2010 I saw Jack Dorsey give this talk at The 99% Conference last month. Berkeley Boalt Law School and runs their entrepreneurship program. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. Tesla is not. It's a great talk. You Can’t Sign This Deal.

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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. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

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Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), Second: I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here. They might be hardware development, software expertise, manufacturing, launching rockets, funding, etc. This post is a continuation of the series.

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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."

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward. Will : Yes, and that was my first brutal intro into the difficulties of raising venture capital where I lived. .

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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.

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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. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner. ——————-.

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 235

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2011

I spent a few days in March in Ann Arbor Michigan as a guest of Professor Thomas Zurbuchen , Associate Dean for Entrepreneurial Programs, and Doug Neal , Director of Center for Entrepreneurship in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. Venture Capital ; met with the local hardware/software venture capital firm.

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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. Venture Capital Issues. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. The amount of capital being invested in new device companies is at an 11 year low.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

All branches of the military (the Air Force and Army would fund the program as well) wanted Stanford to build prototypes of electronic intelligence and electronic warfare systems that could be put into production by partners in industry. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. No kidding.

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Steve Blank

MAY 12, 2015

Here’s Edmund’s description of the I-Corps Lite program. SBIR/STTR Program and Startup Seed Funding. The Small Business Innovative Research ( SBIR ) and Small Business Technology Transfer ( STTR ) programs are startup seed funds created by Congress to encourage U.S. startups that don’t fit whatever’s hot in venture capital.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. – The Torch Program. In size, scale and commercial results China’s Torch Program from MOST (the Ministry of Science and Technology) is the most successful entrepreneurial program in the world. government’s SBIR and STTR programs.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy happen. Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Weekly blog of the customer development narrative.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

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. But starting in the last quarter of that century and accelerating in this one, a new form of financing – risk capital (angel and venture capital) — emerged.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. Our teams were from Berkeley/Columbia EMBA, the Haas/Berkeley Engineering graduate student ranks, and as a co-teacher at Stanford for the National Science Foundation I-Corps program. Let the games begin …. ” Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. – The Torch Program. In size, scale and commercial results China’s Torch Program from MOST (the Ministry of Science and Technology) is the most successful entrepreneurial program in the world. government’s SBIR and STTR programs.

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Programming Technical Review SBIR China 176

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 6, 2014

This is a quote from Leander Kahney’s recently published book on Apple design chief Jony Ive: “In the world according to Steve Jobs, the ANPP would rapidly evolve into a well-defined process for bringing new products to market by laying out in extreme detail every stage of product development.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 1, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. The combination of venture capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. The NSF will fund 100 science and engineering research projects every year. Until today.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

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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

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

Now with over 750 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.) In corporations, the CEO and executives have risen through the ranks for their skill on executing existing programs/missions. We just held our seventh week of the Hacking for Defense class. Slide 2, John Boyd and the OODA Loop (finally!)

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I am also a pilot, and computer engineer, and love to read stories about sigint and black aircraft programs. 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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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Truth: There’s nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. Myth: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback. But they do not blindly do what customers tell them , nor do they mechanically attempt to optimize numbers.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explore the habits that make them successful, and the highs, lows and pivots that pushed them forward. There’s more interest on the business school students and engineer students than there’s ever been.

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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.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 15, 2011

The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development" ; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. What Does This Change?

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Startup Early Stage Business Model 118

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

We faced this same problem in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but we are getting past it. Seed-stage investors are learning the metrics of traction, and are getting better at identifying those companies that are really achieving validated learning about customers. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Given the hardware I had worked on at ESL, learning microprocessors wasn’t that hard but figuring out how to teach hardware design and assembly language programming was a bit more challenging. I looked around the room thinking I’d see the faces of the engineers in the ESL M-4 vault, but these were different people. VP of Sales?

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office. A VERY nice office.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? Was our compensation program good, great?

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