Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

Customer Development 212

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 212

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. Some incubators would have labeled this group too old to be entrepreneurs.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

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

MARCH 3, 2015

Over my career as a serial entrepreneur I observed that since the late 1990s, no early-stage Silicon Valley investor had used business plans to screen investments. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. Even those who asked for them never read them.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

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

APRIL 14, 2013

Sea Turtles and VPN – the connections to the rest of the world. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Almost every entrepreneur I met was using VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall. Perhaps it’s the weather. In the U.S.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. This time, Im discussing the challenge for corporate CFOs and VCs alike in holding entrepreneurs accountable. Read the rest here.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

Why it’s important for entrepreneurs to temper confidence with regular reality checks was the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Chris Schroeder is an American entrepreneur, advisor and investor in interactive technologies and social communications. . You are the entrepreneur.

Washington 285

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 285

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. By 1923, 2/3rds of the courses at Harvard were taught with the case method, and the pattern was set for business education for the rest of the 20th century. This article first appeared in Poets and Quants.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

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. This class is team-based. (We’ll We’ll help Individuals without a team find a place on one.) You will be admitted as a team.

Lean 436

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 436

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Sea Turtles and VPN – the connections to the rest of the world. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Almost every entrepreneur I met was using VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall. Perhaps it’s the weather. In the U.S.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. There’s lots of lore, emotion, and misconceptions of what VC’s do or don’t do for entrepreneurs. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

The rest of the vertical marketing recruits had similar backgrounds (and similar careers.) (I never could find one from the petroleum industry so I wore that hat along with the VP of Marketing title.) Our head of finite element analysis came from General Motor’s Chevy division, where he headed up one of their analysis groups. (He

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Other Roles in a Startup Generic advice given to entrepreneurs assumes that everyone is going to be the founder/co-founder. Reply steveblank , on June 14, 2009 at 2:22 pm Said: Actually this is the mistake most startup entrepreneurs make – particularly in tough economic times. Get customers first.

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

. — As Selections Committee chair for our Sacramento Angels investor group, I review applications from dozens of startup entrepreneurs looking for investment. I remind entrepreneurs that investors are implicitly seeking evidence of progress and milestones (but until the Investment Readiness Level never knew how to ask for it).

Sacramento 306

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 306

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. customer development.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

While finding product-market fit is important, getting the rest of the business model right is the difference between and a great demo and a great business. We did a lot of talking to customers, trying to understand who really had the need. That helped us develop a product. . Grant Warner. What was the value proposition?

Cofounder 120

Cofounder DC Entrepreneur Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2016

Experience and vision were the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. 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. That actually makes a real difference.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Sweden 120

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

A key lesson is that as an entrepreneur, you get to choose your segment. I like to talk about the fact that choosing your segment determines how you will reach your customer, what you will to say to them, and what the sales process will look like (since it depends on the buyer’s process). Glad to see you blogging!

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. startups ignore the rest of the world until they scale in their own country. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

To be honest I built the class out of frustration watching schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs that all they need to know is how to write a business plan or how to sit in an incubator building a product. The results have made the class massively better. For the last 6 years I’ve taught the Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford and Berkeley.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach ( business model canvas + customer development ) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. 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.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 145

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2012

We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. I’m feeling guilty because I was using Customer Development and the Startup Owners Manual until I had that insight. Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun ?/i?pif?n?/.

Flash 313

Flash Customer Development Business Model Developer 313

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really easy. Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers. In many of them I get asked similar questions, including the inevitable “what makes a great entrepreneur?” They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. It is to out friend.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Read the rest of The Five Whys for Start-Ups. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Read the rest of The Five Whys for Start-Ups. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

Why it’s important for entrepreneurs to temper confidence with regular reality checks was the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Chris Schroeder is an American entrepreneur, advisor and investor in interactive technologies and social communications. . You are the entrepreneur.

Washington 120

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 9, 2016

The two guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show tell it like it really is to navigate the chaos of a startup. 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.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Cofounder Entrepreneur IPO 120

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

In general, successful startups do three major things: They understand who their customers are, what they want and clearly define the product or service Unique Selling Point(USP). However, the key difference between a successful and unsuccessful startup rests on the shoulders of the entrepreneur themselves. Source: Pixabay.

Startup 113

Startup Acquisition Business Model Finance 113

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Read the rest of The Startups Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Read the rest of The Startups Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

You can read the rest of his posts on his blog : Introduction , Part 1 , Part 2.) When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. Most of all, I wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you: readers, entrepreneurs, agents of change.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Business Model Design meets Customer Development. the Lean Launchpad, the first hands-on class utilizing the entire business model/customer development / agile development stack.

Agile 250

Agile Business Model Customer Development Lean 250

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. 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.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

My explicit goal in working with HBR is to foster a dialog between entrepreneurs and more traditional general managers. As an entrepreneur, I often saw the best practices of general management fail startups. Read the rest at The Conversation - Harvard Business Review. Read the rest at The Conversation - Harvard Business Review.

San Francisco 119

San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119