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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

Finally, I’ll write about 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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

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Retirement and Redemption « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

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.

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The Product Development Model « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. Were all startups the same? Were startups failing because of product failures or was there some other failure mode? What was the difference here?

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Philadelphia University Commencement Speech – May 15th 2011

Steve Blank

My third story is about Failure and Redemption. Endlessly curious, I went from startups in military intelligence to microprocessors to supercomputers to video games. As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. With every startup came increasing responsibility.

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Ardent War Story 6: Listen more, talk less

Steve Blank

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. But there was one fatal flaw.