Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. So much so that after I started teaching I’d ask, “Can anybody recognize this model of startups? Were all startups the same? Were startups failing because of product failures or was there some other failure mode?

Product Development 146

Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

Customer 201

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture. None of mine did.)

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

Lean 178

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 178

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue.

Lean 178

Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 178

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. What happened?

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

(Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I see startups struggle with this all the time. You have customers, they are using your product, and you are trying to help them. The leadership art is to balance the needs of the present with the needs of the future. Update : bonus thought from Dharmesh Shahs 8 Startup Insights Inspired By The Mega Mind of Seth Godin: 6.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

For the rest of us, there is an alternative: to create credibility by building a lean startup. At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

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.

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. Startup blogging was hardly "cool" back then.

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Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. The guy who replaced him invented the idea of the modern corporation. Understanding the future of entrepreneurship may depend on understanding the contribution each of them made in the past. One guy really did all of this.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.

Redemption 127

Redemption Silicon Valley RSS California 127

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/09/28/unintended-lessons – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? Reply YA , on September 28, 2009 at 12:41 pm Said: Parent seldom teach by telling – they teach by living.

North Carolina 146

North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 146

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup. All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in the canonical garage) follow similar patterns—a series of steps which, when followed, can eliminate a lot of the early wandering in the dark.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 128

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.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

This meeting was a biannual gathering of all the leadership involved in the corporate-wide initiatives to out-innovate their new disruptors. To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The scale of solutions needed dwarf anything a single startup would be working on. Creative destruction.

Framework 391

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 391

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Even if they become part of the founding team, it’s not a given that the founder, having come up with the idea has a “guaranteed” leadership role (CEO or VP) in the new company. In web/mobile startups the canonical view is the founding team consists of a hacker, a hustler, and a designer. And what is critical is trust.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. He prefers to interact directly with the founders of a startup. It’s his job to introduce new startups to the world. Also, his #1 advice for getting coverage on TechCrunch was to make a great product.

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

The startup founder who gets fired just as his/her company is growing into large company could be a cliché – if it wasn’t so true – and painful. Scalable Startups at Adolescence. In our previous post we posited that Scalable Startups are designed to become large companies. Let’s take a look at why.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 18, 2009

On December 10, well have the third Lean Startup workshop with OReilly, also in NYC. The Thought Leadership talks are awesome. I encourage every entrepreneur to not only learn more about the lean startup, but to also find ways to immediately take small steps to put these plans into action in your company. Unconferences?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco DC Sweden Continuous Deployment 60

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

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Those of us who have had the privilege of working in the premier startup hub in the world often take its advantages for granted. In true startup form, the world was forever changed when the CIA and the National Security Agency acted as venture capitalists for this first wave of entrepreneurship. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. Win, lose or draw, these students have a life changing experience where they can network and get smarter as they see what good startup thinking looks like. to compete.

Business Plan 143

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 143

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

How would one set up such a startup to eventually raise capital from outside VCs, who will be wary of ‘dead equity’ (i.e., I was fortunate to get some thoughtful input from the leadership of DarwinApps , Casual Corp , Coventure , HappyFunCorp , OAB Studies , and World Accelerator. equity that belongs to departed cofounders)?

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

For startups (and other innovators ), that’s a decisive advantage. I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) The work itself, especially in startups, depends primarily on intelligence, communication, creativity and empathy. So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Those who have the endurance are the ones that tend to lead teams and join startups, because you just cant be successful in a startup situation without empathy. When a startup encounters difficult technical problems, this is the guy you want solving them. I would characterize them as intolerant but not arrogant. What a waste.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Non-Technical Co-Founders Co-Founders Technical Co-founders Finding Co-Founders Startups & "How Important Are Ideas?" " Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Michael Wolfe , On startup #4 and counting.

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Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42