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.

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

There couldn’t have been a worse choice for CEO in Silicon Valley. Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley was an Oxymoron A key premise of our new company was that our video compression and authoring technology would revolutionize how games were made and played. This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

These posts cover two distinct periods – the first, the rise of “ Microwave Valley ” chronicles the decade of 1946-1956 as Stanford University became the hub of military/industry contracting in the Bay Area. . ————– These posts will make a lot more sense if you look at the earlier Secret History posts.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I Stay out of startups. Just as an aside, over my career I must have interviewed scores of business school graduates (some from the very fine universities where I now teach) who would say, “I want to do strategy.” I just want to do strategy.”

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Reply Dan , on June 4, 2009 at 7:55 pm Said: Great story — reminds me of one I witnessed, very analogous but about 15 years later: I was working on a digital music startup around ’98, ( [link] ) and pitched it to then CEO of mp3.com But you probably never heard of ReelTime.

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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. That meant that our boards were packaged in boxes sold to retailers and were displayed on shelves in their computer stores.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.). Today, startups receive only 4% of those funds, something Clearshore–now in the customer discovery phase–is out to change. Now I’ve had days with 20 viewers per minute. Now Hear This.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 21, 2010

The word conjures images of twenty-something graduate students hacking code in a Silicon Valley dorm room, fueled by a steady supply of Red Bull and Ramen. To be sure, a number of well-known tech titans started more-or-less this way: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard, to name a few.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Posted on December 3, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups I’ve had my ideas “stolen” twice. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “ Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.” Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.”

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Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

For investors outside of Austin and LPs: Austin is a a vibrant startup market and this list of capital sources can help you identify firms to co-invest with and funds to invest in. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. And when you are brainstorming you really do want to hear all ideas and all possible pitfalls.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? The guy who replaced him invented the idea of the modern corporation. Understanding the future of entrepreneurship may depend on understanding the contribution each of them made in the past. Yet you never hear who built that company. What happened to him?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe 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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

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Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

The time has come for the Texas startup community to band together to change the world once again. Texas has produced world-changing startups in the past such as Dell Software , National Instruments and Whole Foods Market but all of those were founded more than 30 years ago. We truly are an accelerator of the Austin startup ecosystem.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. Startups have forced an accelerated cycle of creative destruction for large companies that didn’t exist in the first half of the 20th century. The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent.

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

The myth about pivots is that they are an exception: something undesirable that happens because a startup went seriously awry, and which you should strive to avoid. Actually, startups, like all businesses, work because of a cycle of invention and reinvention. I’m sure its customers wonder, “Why is an organic grocer named RydeOn?”.

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Hippoland

JULY 24, 2016

Valuation is a nebulous topic amongst early stage startups, so I thought I’d really spell it out in detail. Your startup’s valuation is not based on a proforma of your revenue. Many startup investors sat on the sidelines. Supply - amount of your round and Demand - investor demand. 2008-2009 was a terrible time to raise money.

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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. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Is this behavior an outlier or is it the norm in the PR industry? Or is it just someones end of innocence ?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. As a company with a past history, the company had a massive advantage over a typical startup – it had customers. Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Why did I ask these questions?

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. Growth hacking is a term that emerged from the Silicon Valley tech community and the lean startup methodology. One of Qless’s core verticals is the retail industry. It isn’t about finding quick hacks to boost short-term revenue.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978. Here I was, a very junior employee of ESL, a company with its hands in the heart of our Cold War strategy. he asked me. Were you reading those?”

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time. Update – As a followup, we analyzed all of these startup failure post-mortems to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. Also worth a read after you review these startup failure post-mortems. Post-Mortem Title : How My Startup Failed.

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Hearpreneur

AUGUST 19, 2015

business #entrepreneur #startup #story #why #ceo #ceoblognation #CEOs #hearpreneur. We are unbelievably lucky to be here right now, with a team of über-talented people from the best and brightest Silicon Valley companies, at a moment when what a book should be is morphing before our very eyes. Tell Your Business Story!

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image. Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched.

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This is going to be BIG.

MAY 4, 2021

In June of 2019, I got a cold e-mail with a single link: “My name is Braeden Kelekona and I’m the founder of Kelekona, a drone service for passengers and cargo. It seemed unrealistic—not that all startups aren’t in some way realistic—but VCs generally communicate communication style with competency. Below is a link to the pitch video.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2011

I learned that he was originally with William Morris as a junior talent rep but wanted to be more in the business of helping digital startups. I figured it would be a great outcome if we could get both East Coast money and somebody who viewed startups and the world in a similar way that I did. companies versus the Web 1.0

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Reply steveblank , on April 16, 2009 at 10:36 am Said: Jerry, As Domino’s and Amazon found out this week, social networks can quickly disseminate information faster than most traditional marketing organizations can react.

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