Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

It was Steve who first brought Will Harvey to visit Immersion, which led to a strategic investment in There.com, Will’s stealth-mode but sure-fire, can’t-miss startup. We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup.

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Maryland Lean DC Virginia 272

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

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method.

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The Startup Toolkit

JANUARY 12, 2017

You over-engineered some parts and missed the mark on others. Learning in advance that you don’t need to build a feature is one of the highest-impact (and most common) results of good customer development. You crack out some of those clutch features that have been sitting in the backlog for too long.

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Stealth Bootstrapping Valuation Equity 20

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process.

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

They were national efforts of hundreds of companies employing 10’s or 100’s of thousands of engineers. to build sensors, stealth and smart weapons previously thought impossible or impractical, would give us a major military advantage. These programs dwarfed the size that any single commercial company could do by itself.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. But that was two full years before any customers were allowed to use it. Stealth is a customer-free zone. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Nobody even asked the question: why not ship this now?

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Up and Running

JULY 14, 2015

Don’t try and all the sudden add in search engine optimization and whatever else to the mix. You need to go out and do some customer development. I wonder if it comes from the past that motivation to be focused on getting on that original idea perfect where ideas were more typically invention based or engineering based.

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