Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. The same is true in your company.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. Union Square Ventures The next morning I got to spend time with Brad Burnham , partner at Union Square Ventures talking about their investment strategy and insights about web-based businesses.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

Looking for Funds in All the Right Places: The Definitive Guide to Austin Capital By David Altounian and Stephen Straus OVERVIEW For entrepreneurs: We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of capital in Austin to help focus your fundraising efforts. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin.

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Venture Capital Austin Texas Private Equity 54

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover , iterate and execute. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

thebarefootvc

AUGUST 13, 2013

These vertical solutions would focus on specific pain pain points in the enterprise, such as logistics or customer relationship management. The cost of starting a company is much lower, and entrepreneurs have more support than ever to get started. It still surprises me at how few entrepreneurs go through this exercise.

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Advisory Board Cloud Venture Capital Vertical 70

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Yet two smart VC firms, Sigma and Matrix Partners, realized that somewhere in this mess there was value. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

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.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It took lots of trial and error, learning by experience and resilience through multiple failures.

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

Customer Development 124

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

VC Cafe

APRIL 27, 2011

10 things VCs can do to differentiate themselves and provide more value to potential investments – based on feedback from dozens of entrepreneurs. This is the second part of the Entrepreneur’s Wish List. Entrepreneurs use a variety of fundraising sources when looking for many. Can they teach each other something?

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Venture Capital Differentiation Incubator Angel Investor 90

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

Each month, we pick an up-and-coming vertical or theme and do a deep dive (with the help of Mattermark – portfolio plug). And being thesis-driven makes us more efficient when filtering through all the startups we see. These entrepreneurs constantly inspire me and in return, I aim to be as helpful and as kind as I can be.

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Venture Capital Portfolio Vertical Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 6, 2011

6, 2011 we hosted our 64th free One Million by One Million (1M/1M) strategy roundtable for entrepreneurs, and the first for this year. As usual, then, I worked with three entrepreneurs working on specific businesses. In the Entrepreneur Journeys methodology, we focus on customer validation as early as possible. Mava Consulting.

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Vertical Web San Francisco Entrepreneur 115

cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret. A frequent question entrepreneurs have when they are just starting their company is: how secretive should I be about my idea? This includes investors, entrepreneurs, people who work in similar areas, friends, people on the street, the bartender, etc. (I Eric Stromberg.

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Stealth Startup NDA Cofounder 68

Version One Ventures

APRIL 8, 2014

Thus, it should come as no surprise that we are now seeing Venture Capital being disrupted by these forces as well. In his post The Disruption of Venture Capital , Albert Wenger described VC as “the club you had to be invited into.”. Enter Mattermark: where “Big Data Meets Venture Capital”.

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Venture Capital Vertical Curation SEC 160

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance.

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Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

Version One Ventures

JANUARY 2, 2019

Each week we like share our thoughts on a range of topics from vertical markets to general startup advice and our reflections on investing. Running a Startup. We published a three-part series throughout December to help startups manage their changing priorities and strategies as they grow…. “So Venture Capital.

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Silicon Valley Venture Capital Distribution Artificial Inteligence 144

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But at times it’s why entrepreneurs can sink their own companies.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Version One Ventures

JULY 21, 2020

The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company. To us, these are entrepreneurs who will stop at nothing to solve a deep pain point that they know well. Technology changes.

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Founder Vertical Differentiation Portfolio 213

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. This post was mentioned on Twitter by Brendan McManus, [Startup Digest]. Startup Digest] said: Thanksgiving Day [link] [via @sgblank] [.] Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

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Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 137

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

I took the opportunity this past week to publish summary notes of some of the VCs and entrepreneurs I had interviewed on This Week in VC. One of my goals in doing the show was not only to educate entrepreneurs but also to put a human face on many of the VCs in our industry as VCs can be hard to get to know. Startup after Iron Planet?

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Vertical Curation Boston Burn Rate 265

VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

While there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, there is certainly room for improvement and intra-vertical competition as companies master not only supply chain logistics and shipping and handling, but also SEO, social media, and equally as important, staying creative. Practically impossible for a startup.

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eCommerce Open Source SEM Technical Review 94

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 14, 2021

The Startup Magazine continues our Founder Interview series with entrepreneur Richard Lavina, Co-Founder and CEO of accounting services platform, Taxfyle. Here are Richard’s insights and startup advice he shared with us about his entrepreneurial journey…. TSM: Taxfyle is really no longer a startup, it is a “scaleup”.

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CPA Founder Vertical Cofounder 135

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2018

We wanted to learn more about the nuanced industry market forces before applying the same hands-on investing model we do with tech startups in other verticals. The venture capital market in this category is fairly concentrated among series A and expansion-stage funds that prefer to invest in companies with substantial revenue.

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Vertical Stealth Portfolio Seed Capital 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

Third, to share both thinking and practice as I learned how to teach entrepreneurs (the way one teaches artists and musicians.). An innovative entrepreneur put his company to work delivering the podcasts with his compliments. An innovative entrepreneur put his company to work delivering the podcasts with his compliments.

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Silicon Valley California Vertical Customer Development 195

Version One Ventures

NOVEMBER 6, 2013

It was my first day at Version One when I realized that finding “ VC-fundable ” startups would not be easy. With nearly 30,000 startups on AngelList , there’s a lot to sort through. This makes it laboriously difficult to identify rising stars and make comparisons within a specific vertical. Vertical SaaS.

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Vertical B2B B2C Venture Capital 153

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. We were sitting in our cheap hotel room when the phone rang.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “ Serial Communications Controller &# ( SCC ).

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Hunter Walker

MARCH 4, 2014

Approaching Homebrew’s one year anniversary at the end of April so expect some ‘reflective’ posts on my first 12 months in venture capital. . Venture capital isn’t the only way to fund your business and for many at the earliest stages of their startup, it’s one of the worst choices.

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Seed Stage Venture Capital Vertical Finance 134

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. what Market Type is your startup? Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138