Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

—– Lean Innovation Management. Each horizon requires different focus, different management, different tools and different goals. To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. But I’m not convinced those labels are right at all. Are we solving the right problem?

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San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. It’s our hood alignment station,” the plant manager said proudly. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Massive liquidity awaited the first movers to the IPO’s, and that’s how they managed their portfolios. ” Fire, Ready, Aim. He just hired Meg Whitman. The result?

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Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders. Here’s how that happened.

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Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

His reaction reminded me one more time why entrepreneurship is an art, why VC’s manage portfolios of companies and why new ideas come from those who don’t respect the status quo. He was very negative about the concept and strongly suggested the team do a pivot, but the founder was very determined to make a go of his concept.

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Vertical Agile Customer Development Lean 332

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Founders fit the definition of a creator: they see something no one else does. Lessons Learned.

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Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

Potential customers such as gamers who like to play specific types of games? Or people inside companies with a specific title, like product or program managers, CIOs, etc? This is often a tough concept for engineering founders who believe that if we just tell customers about the features that make their product faster, cheaper, etc.

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Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

His reaction reminded me one more time why entrepreneurship is an art, why VC’s manage portfolios of companies and why new ideas come from those who don’t respect the status quo. He was very negative about the concept and strongly suggested the team do a pivot, but the founder was very determined to make a go of his concept.

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Customer Development Vertical Agile Lean 224

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Lets start with what the product manager does.

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San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. Entrepreneurship as It’s Own Management Science. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.

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Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 2, 2010

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. product managers in a startup can either be an asset or an albatross. Except they won’t be called Product Managers.

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Silicon Valley Management San Francisco Product 261

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. In a startup, that’s your job as founder, and it’s a job you can’t afford to delegate. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales).

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

So we built our own tools to enable founders to rapidly translate their vision into hypotheses and then into validated facts. These formalized structures, necessary for managing execution/exploitation, actually strangle disruptive innovation before it can start. Recognizing the anomaly was just the first step.

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Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Instead the business press dumped on the founders for “selling out.” Many founders mentioned this as a reason not to incorporate or grow their companies in Finland. 50% the fault of a Nokia management that didn’t see it coming, while 50% was due to brilliant Apple execution.) Note to Finland – lighten up.

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Finland Naming Russia Government 324

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Jon Sebastiani , founder and CEO of KRAVE Jerky , a company that got its start in my class at Berkeley back in 2011 and was recently acquired by Hershey. Taking My Class.

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Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Once you have assembled the right core team, I recommend prioritizing as follows: First, meet with your portfolio company management. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog. Customer Development.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

If we use our “startup to large company,” diagram, we can see that sustaining innovations occur within a large company’s existing management structures. If you’ve been reading my book on Customer Development and follow my work on Market Type , this type of innovation is best for adding new products to existing markets.

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Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 242

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2019

I suggested they do some research by reading founders’ and investors’ public post-mortems of what went wrong. Since Mei and Bill were networking, there would be a lot to learn if they talked to the founders of startups that built products similar to theirs, but didn’t make it. You’d be surprised how many founders will agree to chat. (At

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Bandwidth Database Venture Capital Demand 281

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Business Model Versus Business Plan.

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Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 275

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

female founders. founder friday. Lessons learned from female founders and women entrepreneurs. Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White on Building a Successful Startup » FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder. Tweet By Elizabeth Knopf (Co-Founder & CEO, Sorced). Scoring Founder “Dates” On My Own.

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Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, January 7, 2010 Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? My explicit goal in working with HBR is to foster a dialog between entrepreneurs and more traditional general managers. Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? - Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Without further ado.

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San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

I just had lunch (at my favorite Greek restaurant in Palo Alto forgetting it looked like a VC meetup) with a friend who was technical founder of his company and is now its chairman. I reminded my friend that I’ve never been an engineering manager so any advice I could give him was just from someone who had seen the movie before.

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Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. Its purpose was to educate management on best practices to run existing companies. Here’s why and what we did about it. that took place in the last quarter of the 19th century.

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Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

In my first meeting with the Onyx I was a bit nonplussed when the management team started trickling into their boardroom. I Know A Great Customer. A year later my co-founders and I had formed Epiphany. Back at Epiphany I convinced my co-founders that integrating the two systems was worth the effort and they dove in.

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Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 259

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. Filed under: Customer Development. Evangelos : Yes.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. In a startup, that’s your job as founder, and it’s a job you can’t afford to delegate. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales).

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention.

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Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

. + 1,000 startup founders, investors, and press! Vinod Khosla Founder Dave McClure Founding Partner Eric Ries Author Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur & Professor Todd Park CTO Travis Kalanick CEO & Co-Founder Joe Zadeh Director of Product Sam Shank Co-Founder & CEO NEW!

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Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

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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