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.

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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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. Reply Dave Goulden , on March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm Said: I love the redefinition of the market.

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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. And the rest is history. I was chief engineer and developer of both those radars while I worked for ITT Electro-Physics Lab in Hyattsville, MD. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

We spent the rest of our time pretending to work on the assigned homework, but really trying to do interesting side projects, like sending juvenile messages across the school network or building primitive video games. We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

” As the managing editor of Bplans, I’ve had the good fortune to learn about business via the content we share; through interviews with LivePlan customers and other business owners; and thanks to brilliant, informal coaching from people like Tim Berry, Noah Parsons, and the rest of the executive leadership team at Palo Alto Software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

For the rest of us, there is an alternative: to create credibility by building a lean startup. Here in Tampa, our biggest challenge is convincing the regions technology "leadership" that grassroots economic development is a good thing. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Thanks for the article.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Heres my favorite part: If youve got a team, part of the team should obsess about the backlist, honing it, editing it and promoting it, while the rest work to generate (as opposed to promote) the frontlist. The leadership art is to balance the needs of the present with the needs of the future. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, August 20, 2009 The Promise of the Lean Startup Im honored to have a guest post on GigaOm to introduce the concept of the lean startup to their audience. The ultimate goal of a lean startup is to identify where its vision intersects with what reality can accommodate.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) + The Customer Development… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 194

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. It was so out of character, people were shocked. True? .&#

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

Silicon Valley 262

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. The rest is just fluff. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

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Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 214

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

The rest of the progress report sounded just like this. PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port?

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. Is it a given that the “lean, hungry&# culture can actually be maintained forever? Don’t let it happen to you.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

While both Stanford and MIT encouraged commercially oriented research and courted federal research contracts in the postwar years, MITs leadership focused on building relations with government agencies and seeking financial support from established electronics producers. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

One of the most common questions I get about the lean startup methodology is, "but what about Steve Jobs ?" When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, heres my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesnt go out and ask customers what they want. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We We need your decision now because we are about to spend $50,000 on new collateral.”

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. I now have 6yr old and 3yr old boys.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. By the time I came back to the United States, he was gone from the company.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 201

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « The Curse of a New Building Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 » 33 Responses William , on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 am Said: Heh.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant. And even if you did it’s the wrong focus, and time spent for a startup 2. If winning $5-10K is your goal, you’re not a scalable startup, just a small business.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 148

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. You want to apply Lean Startup methods at your company, but your boss is used to being the decision-maker and is resistant to the concept of testing ideas. On October 8 at 10a PT, join us for a webcast, Bringing Lean Startup to Established Companies.

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Lean Leadership California Retention 166

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Government Regulations I turned to the class and said, “The rest of you can keep building your company and shipping your product because you don’t need to worry about government regulations.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. You just get successful. This was basically my m.o. in school. They do great stuff.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

At the end of a run I used to lay out and relax on the rocks to rest – at least I did, until the guards asked if I knew that there were more poisonous things per square foot here than anywhere in the world.) Yet if turned my head the other way, I’d stare out at a landscape that was untouched by humans. It shunned publicity.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 276

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. No one was confused after that. Who’s on the Sharp End?

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Even though I learned a huge amount on marketing, leadership and business development, the whole thing was slowly eating me from inside. Working for other people for the rest of my life. When we launched Traindom, we knew nothing about lean startup methodology or customer development. I was 25 years old.

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Panama Africa Internet Email 124

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. However, the mistake would be to confuse the interest in consumer facing companies with mass interest in the rest of corporate America. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. It may happen, but its not there yet. (As

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Never miss an event.

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