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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 4: Customer Hypotheses

Steve Blank

The Agora team decided to formalize the customer discovery process by coming up with a set of Customer Discovery principles and questions that were as good as any I’ve seen. They had 16 interviews with target customers (Zynga, Yahoo, VMware, Walmart, Zeconder, etc.) Most importantly their model of the customer began to evolve.

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The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps – What America Does Best

Steve Blank

I explained that the goal of the Innovation Corps was to bridge what the NSF calls the “ditch of death” – the gap between when NSF research funding runs out and when a team is credible enough (with enough customer and market knowledge) to raise private capital or license/partner with existing companies.

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