Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. 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

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. Most of the time this graph is inappropriate for startups or existing companies creating new markets. But today most startups are trying to ressegment existing markets or create new markets.

Venture Capital 335

Venture Capital Customer Development Business Model Lean 335

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. What’s been missing for everyone is: a common language for investors to communicate objectives to startups. Here’s John’s story.

Sacramento 312

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 312

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 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. Stay out of startups. I just want to do strategy.” Those were very short interviews.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup IP 175

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

When we looked at the color graphics board market, our competitors had defined the market as one measured by technical metrics: screen resolution, number of bits of color, screen refresh rates, acceleration, etc. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that what we had to do was to tell our story around one key metric performance ?

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old.

Silicon Valley 297

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 297

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.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Disruptive innovations are coming from startups – Telsa for automobiles, Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotel rentals, Netflix for video rentals and Facebook for media. As a consequence, corporations used metrics like return on net assets (RONA), return on capital deployed, and internal rate of return (IRR) to measure efficiency.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 270

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

The role of a founding CEO in a startup searching for a business model is radically different than a CEO building and growing a company. So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. What startup stage do they typically invest in? Do they “get&# Customer Development ?

Founder 232

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 232

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel. We had been outsourcing an important part of our demand creation strategy – packaging – to an outside agency without having the expertise to judge or manage the results.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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.

Customer Development 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

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? ) 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.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 18, 2010 Four myths about the Lean Startup Myth: Lean means cheap. Lean startups try to spend as little money as possible. Truth: The Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Myth: The Lean Startup methodology is only for Web 2.0/internet/consumer

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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.

Curation 60

Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.) In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2013

Jim Hornthal splits his time between venture capital, entrepreneurship and education. I think you will see the work of some talented and determined entrepreneurs who have honed their customer discovery and customer development skills to an impressive level. Align and train mentors to embrace customer development.

Lean 288

Lean Cofounder Dividend Business Model 288

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the startup, it's time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven't changed since the early 1900's. The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old.

Silicon Valley 117

Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. Unlike large corporations, startup meetings are not about achieving consensus for every objection raised. Customer Development.)

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 201

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

To give you a better idea of what entrepreneurs in this industry are thinking about during each phase of the startup process, I interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs from all over the world, including our own COO Noah Parsons. Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, popularized this strategy for web applications.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. That’s exactly my point is you’re up against either startups with funding or just entrenched names that have just been around a long time and have a ton of customers and brand value. Edwin: There are a million others.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

It didn’t take us very long to connect the dots between exponential growth, business model innovation and the “Lean Startup” movement. The Lean Startup movement is almost a decade old now and it’s now easier than ever for anyone to learn “Lean Startup” methods and become more entrepreneurial. in developing these new models.

Lean 329

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 329

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

Vertical 156

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 156

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White on Building a Successful Startup » FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder. After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. However, I needed to actually build it!

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Hunter Walker

DECEMBER 19, 2013

With Homebrew , Satya and I both consider ourselves a startup in its “product-market fit” phase. The only way to succeed in venture capital is backing wonderful entrepreneurs and working hard on their behalf. ” Is it when you successfully raise your first dollar or finish the fundraising?

Cofounder 104

Cofounder Term Sheet Seed Stage Portfolio 104

Version One Ventures

MAY 22, 2018

Are you looking for help and expertise in hiring, product strategy, customer development, fundraising, coaching, therapy, etc.? If you find yourself in the fortunate position of being oversubscribed, you’ll likely look to build the best investor base and find the right partners for your journey. What is important to you?

Cap Table 60

Cap Table Cofounder Syndicate Syndication 60

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Some great content around the intersection of startups and being a Startup CTO in June this year. This continues my series of posts: Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March The following are the top items based on social signals.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Useful blogs and links for startups Click Here ————– 2.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). Venture Capital Cafe > Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). VC & Startup Resources. Seed Startups. VC Cafe covers early stage Israeli and European tech & mobile startups. Hundreds of startups featured since 2005, will yours be next? About VC Cafe.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53