Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

It also made me understand what kind of support sales people needed from marketing and what marketing programs were wasted motion. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Given the hardware I had worked on at ESL, learning microprocessors wasn’t that hard but figuring out how to teach hardware design and assembly language programming was a bit more challenging. If you wanted your own applications, you had to write them yourself. You created it and own it.

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

These were the people who had the face-to-face interaction with our customers. Was our compensation program good, great? Hypothesis to test After writing up the questionnaire, and before I called the customers, I wrote a one page summary of who I thought the customers were, what markets they were in, how and why they bought, etc.

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I Love Business Plan Competitions I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. I hate business plan competitions. making a plan and winning is like writing a great profile for dating.

Business Plan 140

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy happen. We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Silicon Valley 124

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SVPG

AUGUST 30, 2013

This is not a new technique, but you may recognize it as the foundation of Customer Discovery and Customer Development. I''m talking about the power of a happy, reference customer. First, let''s be clear what it means to be a reference customer. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products.

Customer 65

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. BUT, they moved into a nice office off of Sand Hill Road.

Silicon Valley 205

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? Great art and great programming are fostered within a community that shares an ethic of care for its members. The Adventure of a Lifetime. Everything else flows from that.

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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. From 1977 to 1981 Perry cranked up spending for research and development on a massive scale. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

automatic links to generated images Rietveld - asynchronous code reviews on changesets Tech*if*er0*urs – blog on roadmap for learning rails Best free programming books Project Management Basecamp - web-based project management and collaboration tool. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. It’s more reference material.

Software Review 110

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name. When you got off the elevator, you faced a non descript corporate-looking set of walls.

Silicon Valley 128

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 133

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

military missile program in the 1950′s (Atlas, Thor, etc.) I can’t get this one out of my head. ———— The VENONA Project One of the most interesting (declassified) stories of cryptography is the deciphering of Soviet communications to their diplomatic missions in the U.S during World War II.

Silicon Valley 135

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I am also a pilot, and computer engineer, and love to read stories about sigint and black aircraft programs. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you. Also, it would be nice to do something that helps this country (but not solely for that reason).

Silicon Valley 170

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Reply Customer Development and Start-up Models « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:06 am Said: [.] Posts are going to be a mix of topics: entrepreneurship, secret history and conservation. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week. BTW, keep the comments coming, they’re read and appreciated.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 260

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Nine months into my year tour, and seven months into my reading program, I was learning something interesting every day. (We Instead someone realized that the knowledge I had accumulated could provide the big picture to brief new guys “read in” to this compartmentalized program. We could do what!? From where??) It had no PR agency.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of people worked on developing strategic weapons, bombers, our ICBM and SLBM missile programs, and the Apollo moon program. These programs dwarfed the size that any single commercial company could do by itself. During the cold war, the U.S. government kept up the pace.

Silicon Valley 121

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Historically, these were two guys with high testosterone. True? .&#

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Known as the “Inventor of the Modern Corporation,” Sloan was president of General Motors from 1923 to 1956 when the U.S. If you look around the United States it’s hard to avoid Sloan.

Silicon Valley 156

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

ELINT Tasking The ELINT program sought answers to operational questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? We needed this data to build radar jammers that could make the Soviet air defense radars ineffective so our bombers with their nuclear payloads could reach their targets.

Silicon Valley 155

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Ampex’s first customer was Bing Crosby who wanted to record his radio programs for rebroadcast (and had exclusive distribution rights.) Like all government programs, the SBIC was fond of paperwork, but it began to formalize, professionalize and standardize the way investors evaluated risk.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Terman proudly pointed out that only Stanford, MIT and Harvard had a military sponsored electronics program. The eventual goal of this program would have been to radar-map the Soviet Union. The crash program to produce the Lockheed U-2 aircraft was initiated when the balloon program was abandoned. By 1947 the U.S.

Silicon Valley 153

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. In my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.”

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> There are some other serious reasons why we dont want to go public right now.

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www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Tactic-specific metrics – Obviously there are other metrics you will track depending on the types of programs you are running such as email metrics, website traffic metrics, attendance metrics, etc. I do this by program/campaign so I can compare email campaigns to pure advertising (for example). April Amrita Reply 13.

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