Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

Greycroft is Alan’s venture capital firm that recently raised its second fund ($130 million) with offices in both New York and LA. 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.

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PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

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.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 227

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Draw Your Ideas - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 16, 2010 I saw Jack Dorsey give this talk at The 99% Conference last month. The video is only 16 minutes long and it is well worth the time. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Tesla is not. It's a great talk.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. Arguments that I had heard at my own startups seem to be repeated at others. Blog at WordPress.com.

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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 253

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

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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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.) He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) Our head of finite element analysis came from General Motor’s Chevy division, where he headed up one of their analysis groups. (He Blog at WordPress.com.

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Steve Blank

JULY 8, 2010

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis , founder of Mahalo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or you’re not. Take a look at the video below. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital. Taking Sides.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Oh, and since it was not code compatible with anything, we were going to have to port all the key scientific applications our customers needed (as soon as we figured out who they were.) A few days later Gordon became a founder. We were going to be guessing. I invited him to meet the team. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of funding and got an 8-digit term sheet that same afternoon.

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e.

Vertical 162

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Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Founders operate in a chaotic regime. Victor Hugo.

Silicon Valley 289

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 289

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. I recently completed the Validation step (less the industry analyst presentations) and am ready to move on to Customer Creation. On a more serious note, any tips on attracting founders? So the ask is made — shall it be given?

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Eric Friedman

JUNE 16, 2016

They are incredible founders, with amazing backgrounds, working on great ideas. Expa is a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new products. This experience has been integrated into a platform to help founders increase their startup’s chance of success.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. Today he is the co-founder and Chairman of Triporati, LaunchPad Central. My prior journeys were spearheaded by the founder of this school of teaching, Steve Blank. Align and train mentors to embrace customer development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. There were no venture investors. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. And no one who really knew could tell you.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Our LivePlan customers are entrepreneurs, our founder and staff have run and sold companies, the Bplans readers are aspiring entrepreneurs (or actual entrepreneurs), and as I sell my own handmade jewelry, I like to think I have a very small claim to the title. See Also: 15 Videos To Inspire You in 2015. If you fail, try again.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. Reply The Secret History of Silicon Valley 12: The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2 « Steve Blank , on October 29, 2009 at 12:30 pm Said: [.] to get acquired to raise money or get their founders and investors liquid.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

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. A Day in the Life of A Founder For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. Wondering how do I get in touch with you - I am founder of a company here in San jose, CA and would like to invite you to be part of our advisor team. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 21, 2010

Rich Karlgaard , publisher of Forbes and co-founder of the Churchill Club refereed the event. BTW, the definition of entrepreneurship I describe at 2:50 into the video is described in detail in the post “ You’re Not a Real Entrepreneur.&# the video skipped or something? Here’s a 6 minute excerpt from the talk.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation. Over the last 35 years venture capital has funded nimble new entrants (on a scale never imagined by Schumpeter ) who exist to exploit discontinuities in technology or customer behavior.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Customer Development.)

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Reply An Interview with Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines and ONEList — TechDrawl , on July 10, 2009 at 3:56 pm Said: [.] Employ customer development.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

And even more importantly, was there any way to reduce risk in early stage ventures? familiar with Customer Development you should be. It’s very different than the traditional product development model. Where as most start-up founders start with the conviction that they know success looks like and [.]

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Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 159

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

The founder of what became General Motors was William (Billy) Durant. Billy Durant - Founder General Motors More in the next posts. Ford family did a pretty good job of managing founder-to-manager transition in car business and are still playing a big role in their enterprise 100 years since. What happened to him? Who was he?

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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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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 15, 2011

The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development" ; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Structure : Founders operate in a chaotic regime.

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Startup Early Stage Business Model 118

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. My co-founder, head of business development and I were in Japan raising money. What if, gasp, someone steals my idea?

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