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 3: Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster.

Early Stage 292

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 292

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Enter “ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses “, a New York Times bestseller by founder of IMVU (creator of 3D avatars) Eric Ries. Not doing so would end up in wasteful innovations and features that customers do not want.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

When it comes to being an entrepreneur, establishing a personal brand through a website is critical to success. If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. Here’s the entrepreneur’s guide to getting your first website off the ground. Custom development.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

In the real world a big pivot in life sciences far down the road of development is a very bad sign due to huge sunk costs. Other pivots involved moving from a platform technology to become a product supplier, moving from a therapeutic drug to a diagnostic or moving from a device that required a PMA to one that required a 510(k).

SBIR 319

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 319

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

. — Teaching students to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. These two startups had problems they could not solve on their own due to lack of resources—time, people, money. Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. Then the cycle repeats with a new set of technologies. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup. And it may work. Dot Com Boom to Bust.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim." But along the way, something strange happened.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

In 2007, I graduated United States Air Force Academy as a computer engineer and entered the Air Force’s acquisition corps , excited and confident about my ability to bring technology to bear for our airmen. I was their technical man on the inside – making sure big defense contractors delivered on their promises.

Lean 268

Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 268

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. It went up on their blog yesterday. _. Forward Partners and Crowdcube are both attacking elements of these problems.

Early Stage 119

Early Stage Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review 119

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

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, June 2, 2010 The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. 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

Hearpreneur

JULY 30, 2016

Female entrepreneurs and business owners are no longer taken with a grain of salt. Female entrepreneurs continue to make strides in business despite the pay gap, discrimination, and gender politics which play out on both large and small stages. In 2015, businesses owned by women brought in more than $1.5 trillion in sales.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Technical Cofounder Entrepreneur CTO Hire 48

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? This would seem to be a fatal stake through the heart of the class.

Lean 413

Lean Security Asia SBIR 413

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same infrastructure tools they have used for the past 20+ years: Excel and recent college grads searching Google. According to Knowledge.VC , under 5% of US VCs have a full-time team member focused on technology. . But we’re doing it slowly.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Summer is always the time when large numbers of new participants in the tech ecosystem arrive and start to get their bearings. It’s also surprisingly difficult for students to get plugged-in to everything that is happening in the local tech ecosystem. Greenhorn Connect: Excellent collection of BOS tech events and resources.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. 50% the fault of a Nokia management that didn’t see it coming, while 50% was due to brilliant Apple execution.) Ultimately, Nokia’s difficulties will turn out to be good news for Finnish entrepreneurs.

Finland 331

Finland Naming Russia Government 331

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

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog. Relationships with Venture Partners, Entrepreneurs in Residence , and other non-salaried personnel who can help your companies. I recommend building a strong internal tech stack, to handle the deluge of requests for help you’ll get from companies as you scale. AskAnything.VC

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2015

Successful entrepreneurs show up a lot and make their own luck. Both of these traits made all the difference for the two latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. Steve : … entrepreneurs make their own luck. … I delivered newspapers at night … for the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Las Vegas 120

Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder Nevada 120

The Next Web

JUNE 8, 2014

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' And more importantly, B2B companies. This story continues at The Next Web.

B2C 132

B2C B2B IP Technical Review 132

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

When I went through their financials as part of my due diligence I realized that if they ditched their low margin disk drive products, it wouldn’t take much to make them a profitable company. They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for.

Silicon Valley 165

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 165

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. One of the last entrepreneurs I met on a funding trip, ended up raising a $6M round in Italy. A handful of entrepreneurs made it , and I was happy to be a backer. Reference Checks.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

crowdSPRING Blog

JUNE 6, 2014

The embedded presentation above is filled with valuable data on the state of the Internet and trends in technology around the world. How to Outsource without the Headache | by Frank Gruber in Tech Cocktail – crowdspring.co/1hyLg7A. Customer] Retention is King (good insights on measurement) – crowdspring.co/1haiyJt.

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Software Review 94

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Anyway, let’s dive into this topic more, starting with technical debt.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) This mantra of talking to customers and iterating the product is the basis of the Lean Startup Methodology that Eric Ries has been evangelizing and I’ve been teaching at U.C. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

Over time, innovations outside the company (demographic, cultural, new technologies, etc.) The company loses customers, then revenues and profits decline and it eventually gets acquired or goes out of business. If you’re an entrepreneur, you spend your time worrying about how to get out of the box on the left and move to the right.

Search 249

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 249

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 11, 2011

To give a little context, I asked two of the other judges - Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-authors of the excellent Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development ) - to add a bit of commentary. Great use of airbnb for their source of customer development won them 'Best #CustDev Award."

New York City 161

New York City New York Lean SMS 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Notice that none of those five reasons deals with TDD or automated testing, which have changed the game. This is the approach of test-driven-development (TDD). Even if youve developed for years without automated tests, this one practice is part of a remarkable feedback loop. Do you have testers?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 9, 2013

Besides the loss of potential future revenue, any sunk costs (costs you initially incur to gain the customer) are unrecoverable. If you lose a customer due to price or other circumstances beyond your control, then fine. However, losing a customer because he or she felt unappreciated or underserved is inexcusable.

Customer 170

Customer Technical Review Florida Cofounder 170

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 I will quote a prominent, well-known entrepreneur whom I like and respect and who told me when he was raising money, “I don’t know how much I’m going to charge for my product so why should I create an artificial spreadsheet? How much will you pay?

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

It said, “teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom “ Since then I’ve had a series of interesting careers: technician in the Air Force, tech writer, marketer, entrepreneur, CEO and now educator and mentor. Actually they’re entirely different. I had no idea I was being mentored and never asked for it.

Lean 223

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

I’m putting myself in the same boat now with the solution I’m developing so could you tell me: 1. How did you reach out to your first customer? How you convinced them to pay up when code review at that stage was nonexistent? It’s rarely true that your first customer will be big. I think you meant this ?

Customer 231

Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

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.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105