Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

When they found out, they questioned my decision-making and me as an entrepreneur. How to recognize when it’s time to pull the plug on your startup idea, and why founders can’t operate afford to operate in a vacuum were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Meanwhile, the investors thought we were dead.

Columbus 245

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 245

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. Given something tangible, customers were able to start gauging their willingness to use and pay.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

How to make corporate innovation work and drive success in startups were the topics of discussion with the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Srivastava leads Verizon’s innovation outpost (their Silicon Valley R&D center) in Palo Alto focusing on building products and services powered by big data and analytics.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? Quite a few of the teams were building biotech, devices or digital health products. gather data essential to customer purchases before doing the science. – See more here.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Your product and company vision needs to match your appetite for funding. Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He was a life-long entrepreneur and the first business he created out of college (actually, he founded it while he was at Caltech) was a company that manufactured high quality audio speakers. He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

As a serial entrepreneur turned educator, this didn’t make sense to me. In my experience, I saw that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. The class was unique in that it was 1) team-based, 2) experiential, 3) lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering).

Lean 248

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 248

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 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs. Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

When they found out, they questioned my decision-making and me as an entrepreneur. How to recognize when it’s time to pull the plug on your startup idea, and why founders can’t operate afford to operate in a vacuum were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Meanwhile, the investors thought we were dead.

Columbus 120

Columbus Entrepreneur Ohio Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

I learned a lot at Convergent, going from product marketing manager in a small startup to VP of Marketing of the Unix Division as it became a public company. And one would become my mentor and partner in later companies.) Two of my role models for my career were in this company. (And But this story is not about Convergent.

Entrepreneur 276

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 276

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

I originally conceived it as the Top 11 things that I believe “all entrepreneurs need to succeed.&# If it stuck to this theme then I would stand by my top 11. It isn’t a “must&# for me but it’s certainly a huge positive when entrepreneurs have it. Are you launching a mobile application?

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

One of the attributes of great entrepreneurs is that they are tenacious and relentless. Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. Here’s our story: We started like most entrepreneurs — an idea, an opportunity, and very little money.

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Yet we hadn’t shipped a single product. The positive effect of the tidal wave of press was as a door opener for us to raise money from corporate partners. Our VP of Business Development had no problems getting meetings and fund raising was easy. All this activity occurring before we actually shipped a product.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. The traditional business plan is an essential organizing and planning document to launch new products in existing companies with known customers and markets. Business Model Versus Business Plan.

Business Model 275

Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 275

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. Here’s how.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Taking My Class.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

Two developments have changed the face of startup investing in the UK in recent years. The first development is increased capital efficiency. Entrepreneurs can now achieve an awful lot with very little money. Forward Partners and Crowdcube are both attacking elements of these problems. Startup general interest'

Early Stage 119

Early Stage Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review 119

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

I remember thinking, “Wow, whoever’s on the other end of phone sounds just like an entrepreneur, they were asking for the impossible.” We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. After returning to their schools, they got out of their labs while they built their products.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

One of early surprises of this class for me is finding out that the broad category of “Life Sciences” fails to provide the important nuances of each category to entrepreneurs, investors, educators, policy makers, etc. It turns out that for commercialization, the business model (Customers, Channel, Revenue Model, etc.)

Lean 258

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 258

The Next Web

JUNE 8, 2014

Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber of are partners at YL Ventures. Developing an enterprise-grade SaaS product is not easy. The keys are maintaining capital efficiency, launching early versions to the SMB market and constantly applying customer development methods. Design & Dev Entrepreneur Analysis and Opinion'

B2C 132

B2C B2B IP Technical Review 132

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." Seth Sternberg Co-Founder & CEO Scott Chacon CIO Kevin Hale Senior Product Manager NEW!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

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. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc. It is the key to “customer development” that Steve Blank talks about. I’m going to save that for a future blog post.

PR 279

PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

A big piece of the solution lies in the scalable impact of entrepreneurship and an increase of successful entrepreneurs. Max continued, “That’s why I’m really interested in ways of optimizing the entrepreneurship ecosystem to allow more entrepreneurs to go from idea to reality. I was feeling pretty old.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

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. – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products.

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The case method and business plans are the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create startups. But the case method is the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create a startup. Here’s why and what we did about it.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers. As an entrepreneur my problem was that I had too many ideas. As an entrepreneur my problem was that I had too many ideas.

Entrepreneur 335

Entrepreneur Framework Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. Companies pursuing innovation can Buy, Build, Partner or use Open Innovation. Horizon 3 is where companies put their crazy entrepreneurs.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 People mistook extra doses of Ajax for a successful product. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. Short answer: absofuckinglutely.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

Qualcomm’s visionary CEO, Paul Jacobs , wanted to use internal Qualcomm ideas to find breakthrough innovation that could be turned into products, (not simply a suggestion box for creative thoughts or improving sustaining innovation.) He gave my innovation team free reign on designing a new employee innovation program.

Programming 291

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 291

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

Today, however there are two important updates for entrepreneurs everywhere. Two years in the making and literally ten years in development, I’m proud to announce that my new book, The Startup Owners Manual , goes onto the printing press next Tuesday. While entrepreneurship is in the news fairly regularly, I seldom make news myself.

Entrepreneur 289

Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 289

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

Qualcomm’s visionary CEO, Paul Jacobs , wanted to use internal Qualcomm ideas to find breakthrough innovation that could be turned into products, (not simply a suggestion box for creative thoughts or improving sustaining innovation.) He gave my innovation team free reign on designing a new employee innovation program.

Programming 283

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 283

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development. AskAnything.VC

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

Hacking 4 Recovery is a 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad / Hacking For Defense / National Science Foundation I-Corps curriculum that’s trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators. Additional 5-day-long classes will explore Health, Travel and Hospitality, Food Service, Entertainment and Education. Course Description.

Lean 436

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 436