Steve Blank

OCTOBER 23, 2023

Some commercial company roles: Business Development or “BD” roles : Case Officers are well suited for business development (BD) roles as its akin to first half of the CIA recruitment cycle. Sales roles : The sales cycle is similar to the recruitment cycle of a source. Here’s what I learned.

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Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 234

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

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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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 16, 2012

Fund raising (as is much of life) is a sale – pure and simple. As with any sales campaign you need to: Qualify your buyers early so you focus your scarce resources on people likely to buy your product. . Three rules in sales: Why buy anything? Remember again that the three major steps to a sale are: Why buy anything?

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Developer Silicon Valley PR Las Vegas 366

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

This post describes how companies using the Customer Development model can increase their credibility, valuation and probability of getting a first round of funding by presenting their results in a “Lesson Learned&# venture pitch. Is there a profitable business model? Can it scale?” Just as a refresher.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve seen the Valley grow from Sunnyvale to Santa Clara to today where it stretches from San Jose to South of Market in San Francisco. I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. So how did this happen? Where is it going?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. After many sales calls, early prospects showed little rush to buy it! A few of the many quotations that struck me: “Most startups fail due not to the failure of product development but due to the lack of customers”.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

And the wrong message is frankly strewn all over Silicon Valley. And this is fueled by the VC culture in Silicon Valley. So investing $3-5 million in a company and taking a year to 18 months to see how it develops before adding more fuel can often be the right course of action. Or pivoted too quickly.

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Berkonomics

OCTOBER 5, 2023

Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues. There is an art to efficient management of a process, whether that is the process of bringing a product to market from R&D to production or developing a new product’s launch program.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 1, 2020

This point was highlighted well in the classic book, “ Disrupting Digital Business ,” by R “Ray” Wang, CEO and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research. New ways are being developed every day to reward and influence people who participate in crowdsourcing, for a very low cost.

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Silicon Valley Flash Social Media Software Review 312

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 19, 2019

Silicon Valley gets significant attention for its role in producing tech startups that often go on to see massive, international success. So they broke down the “art of sales” and turned it into science. This attitude is ideal for developing new tech startups.

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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.” Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2018

Robust startup economies are popping up in communities all over the country, proving that entrepreneurs can succeed outside of Silicon Valley. stars*, Tech Elevator, Bunker Labs and others in your community which provide access to diverse developers, business leaders, mentors, and board members. Look to organizations like i.c.

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Version One Ventures

AUGUST 7, 2018

The predominant narrative among Silicon Valley start-ups has been: don’t open a second office until you have reached 100+ employees. Among our Silicon Valley-based portfolio companies, not a single company past “A” does not have a distributed team. for customer service and in Eastern Europe and India for development.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 26, 2020

You may have heard that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley no longer read business plans. To be clear, I define a product specification as the technical definition of your product, to be used for development and testing purposes, with a quick business summary for context. Include marketing, sales, and customer rollout plans.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

It’s a paradox, but early sales success in a startup can kill its chances of becoming a large successful company. The cause is often sales and marketing execs who’ve become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. And this time sales revolted. He was paid 1% of gross sales.

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Austin Startup

JANUARY 20, 2021

The Ferrari Museum in Modena, Italy The defining characteristic of the Silicon Valley startup is speed. In the world of startups, the idea of speed is often mentioned alongside shipping products and executing company-wide sprints but rarely is it discussed explicitly within the function of Sales. 2021 instead of 2022.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 26, 2020

In an instant, remote work went from a small Silicon Valley trend to a ubiquitous element of daily life. Even in developing countries, fast connections are now common enough that almost anyone that needs a fast internet port has access to one. It’s easy to vet Silicon Valley hires. Recruiters and Resumes.

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online.wsj.com

JULY 11, 2012

Theres a power struggle underway in Silicon Valley. But Andreessens approach is also exposing a rift in Silicon Valley, where a group of young and relatively untested entrepreneurs have maintained control over their rapidly growing companies. gave up 70% of the company to American Research & Development Corp.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. And this Silicon Valley bias isn’t limited to any single meeting – it has been a recurring theme in my time as a VC. Funding is different outside of Silicon Valley.

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Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Back in 2004 when Eric and his IMVU co-founder Will Harvey approached me about investing in IMVU, I agreed on one condition – they had to take my Customer Development class at UC Berkeley Haas Business School.

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YoungUpstarts

MAY 2, 2018

In this fictional series, a disillusioned software developer Naveen quits his job via a drunken phone call on a night out. On the show the girls are required to develop new products in pairs, and the winning ideas will be funded and supported. Silicon Valley. TVF Pitchers.

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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. CEO – “Well, we’ve missed our sales numbers for the last six months.” VP of Sales – “Sure.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley, including those working abroad, often have to retool Lean Startup methods to apply them in places with very different business cultures. Those conversations can often circle around the difficulties of entrepreneurship outside Silicon Valley. On September 24 in the U.S.

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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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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

PM’s are underrated in Silicon Valley these days. Early-stage companies shouldn’t: outsource core product development, have consulting firms build it for them to speed up time-to-market, shouldn’t hire too many business people until product is complete and early product/market fit tested.

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Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. Srivastava leads Verizon’s innovation outpost (their Silicon Valley R&D center) in Palo Alto focusing on building products and services powered by big data and analytics. He was the CEO of two startups.

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YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2020

For example, do you fly out to a big indus­try conference to close some sales, or do you stay home to attend your daughter’s high school graduation? Programming a piece of software, for example, is different from taking a sales meeting with the CEO of a credit union. Are you self-funded? Are you planning for growth?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 25, 2018

Most startups are created by one or two entrepreneurial founders, with a vision and focus on developing an innovative solution, rather than on developing people. It’s easy to see how cultures go astray, for example, when you pay only for sales volume, but expect a high focus on customer satisfaction. Place shapes culture.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject.

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The Next Web

FEBRUARY 1, 2014

is a venture capitalist investing in Silicon Valley and Singapore. So you have a great idea for a new mobile app or Web service—but you don’t know anything about coding or developing. What drives sales for online services and mobile apps? Step 3: Outsource a developer. and overseas developers.

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Web Silicon Valley Salary Demand 160

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2023

I personally sold the first big deals and hired the VP of sales who’s building the sales team in our New York office. My VP of Sales and I are running as fast as we can, but I’ve been around long enough to know I might be the ex-CEO if we can’t scale.”. During the Covid pandemic, most of her engineering team worked remotely.

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YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

An employee’s curiosity to learn the nuances of his or her job – whether it’s making adjustments in a sales technique or honing the ability to stay calm when problems arise – should be treated with the utmost respect. So how do you create a sense of belonging at work? Here are things to think about: 1. Make them feel valued.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S. I was stunned.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). So why did Larry need to return?

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

Recently I wrote a post arguing to make the definition of a Startup more inclusive than that to which Silicon Valley, fueled by Venture Capital return profiles, would sometimes like to attach to the word. ” Put simply, if you care about building a successful tech community outside Silicon Valley you should read this book.

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