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. Just a quick history refresher.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

The previous post described how China built its science and technology infrastructure. This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. Of all the Chinese government programs, the Torch Program is the one program that kick-started Chinese high-tech innovation and startups. Innovation Clusters.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

As I was reading a history of the startup years of Fairchild Semiconductor , I realized that a problem I thought was new – sales as an obstacle to Pivots – had occurred 50 years ago at the dawn of what would become Silicon Valley. Unlike transistors, no one in 1960 was clamoring for the new technology.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. This doesn’t mean just more technology stuff, though we’ll get that. Over the last half a century, Silicon Valley has grown into the leading technology and innovation cluster for the United States and the world.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. These are probably the two sites where I've posted the most reviews. One out of ten of Americans are out of work.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Then the cycle repeats with a new set of technologies.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

In class I teased Todd that while the Navy had me present my Secret History of Silicon Valley talk in front of 4,000 cadets at the Naval Post Graduate School , I had yet to hear from the Air Force Academy. I was their technical man on the inside – making sure big defense contractors delivered on their promises.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? This would seem to be a fatal stake through the heart of the class.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

When I went through their financials as part of my due diligence I realized that if they ditched their low margin disk drive products, it wouldn’t take much to make them a profitable company. They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. Tech acquisitions went crazy at the same time the IPO market did. 3) invest in and take equity stakes in exchange for capital.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) This mantra of talking to customers and iterating the product is the basis of the Lean Startup Methodology that Eric Ries has been evangelizing and I’ve been teaching at U.C. I was an idiot.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Once he was on board, I sat down with him on a weekly basis to review our progress with our list of software vendors. Reply Daily Review #21 | The Queue Blog , on November 9, 2009 at 8:06 pm Said: [.] Think Different I still remember the day I discovered that I thought about progress differently than other people.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.] Isn’t theory fun? Gracias for another great read Steve!

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Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Four decades ago my first job in Silicon Valley was with ESL, the first company to combine computers and signals intelligence. The founder of this 1964 Silicon Valley startup was Bill Perry. In these last three weeks the benefit of having a team of mixed business and technical resources becomes apparent.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Lesson learned, review how each action [.]

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” I had thrown myself into a startup because work was an exciting technical challenge with a fixed set of end points and rewards. What is a dream worth?

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Meanwhile our company was pouring an enormous amount of dollars into building tools and video compression technology, while also hiring a lot of high-priced Hollywood talent like art directors, and script and story editors. Was my response to stop development of the games? Bring in some outside professionals to review our progress?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering. It will cost you your job.” It became [.]

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. Their national technical means of verification made the world a safer place and hastened the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.)

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Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Summer is always the time when large numbers of new participants in the tech ecosystem arrive and start to get their bearings. It’s also surprisingly difficult for students to get plugged-in to everything that is happening in the local tech ecosystem. Greenhorn Connect: Excellent collection of BOS tech events and resources.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. It’s harder to remember that we have no perpetual rights to them, they aren’t our due, but they’re gifts. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Inside the covers of these publications our customers had said that it was the product reviews that most influenced their buying decisions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. What started as a technical problem actually turned out to be a human and process problem. We didnt even practice TDD across our whole team.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2010

This “debate” feels like the story about the blind men describing the elephant – what seems an absolute truth may be relative due to the deceptive nature of half-truths. Or was there something about the (venture capital) culture of the valley at the time that didn’t think they could be entrepreneurial founders or investors?

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Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

This form of planning condensed the business model onto one page and is most useful for high-growth, technically focused startups (think Silicon Valley). For us, this methodology made sense for high growth technology startups seeking to define and prove a new business model. Step 3: Develop a Financial Model.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

What reviews did they trust? Yet our customers said they got their company and product information from only three publications: MacWorld, MacUser and MacWeek. They said the product reviews in these publications were by far the biggest influence on which card to buy. (This made our PR problem manageable and focused.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. Student Feedback. He runs H4X Labs.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And the odds in your favor are even higher, as most of your peers wouldn’t even get into the game due to some unspoken belief that in a meritocracy, good things will come to those who wait. While MBA’s have a ton of useful skills, what they don’t have is what most marketing departments lack – customer insight.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 The hackers lament One of the thrilling parts of working and writing in Silicon Valley is the incredible variety of people Ive had the chance to meet. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. All is not lost, though.

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