Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

Over time, innovations outside the company (demographic, cultural, new technologies, etc.) How large companies can stay innovative and entrepreneurial has been the Holy Grail for authors of business books, business schools, consulting firms, etc. outpace an existing company’s business model. A short list at the end of this post.).

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

A complete list of book tour stops for the first leg of my journey is below. Many of you who pre-ordered the book -especially those of you on Kindle- have already received your copy. The Amazon.com reviews page for the book has just opened to the general public (up until now it's been limited to Amazon Vine reviewers).

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Hearpreneur

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Technology platforms, development paradigms, and the vendor landscape have been shifting at a rate that very few organizations have been able to keep up with. The organizations that do manage to keep up are further driving change by redefining the technology landscape around their platforms, causing the rest to fall even further behind.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built. My new book, The Startup Owners Manual , outlined the steps of building a startup or new division inside a company in far greater detail.

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Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

We’re standing 15 air miles away from the epicenter of technology innovation. I’ve been asked to talk today about the future of Innovation – typically that involves giving you a list of hot technologies to pay attention to – technologies like machine learning. In fact, it’s not about any specific new technologies.

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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.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 19, 2022

I was pleased to see some specific guidance on how team members can better communicate their value at work, without self-aggrandizing, in a new book, “ Influence and Impact ,” by Bill Berman and George Bradt, who speak from experience as a psychologist, and years of coaching in companies across multiple industries.

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VC Cafe

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

It’s only been a bit over a month since the start of 2025 past year has witnessed seismic shifts in technology, from breakthroughs in generative AI to emerging solutions in climate tech and healthcare. This is an extension of the previous list with new sources and startup requests. You can find the 2024 RFS list here.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 13, 2023

I believe that a fully engaged team is the key to both productivity and agility in the face of change. In my search for guidance on modern business leadership studies, both scientific and actual case studies, I was impressed with a new book, “ Head and Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership ,” by Dr. Kirstin Ferguson.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. No more, no less.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Heres the catch.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

Technology cycles have become a treadmill, and for startups to survive they need to be on a continuous innovation cycle. Technology Cycles Measured in Years. But in the 20th century, dominated by hardware and software, technology swings inside an existing market happened slowly — taking years, not months.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. And you’ll still need to have a resilient and agile personality, as new customer and product opportunities will appear and change your work. How quickly will you recover?

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 29, 2019

From meager beginnings selling books online back in 1994, Amazon is currently the largest e-commerce retailer and cloud computing platform in the world, and now dominates even the giant Walmart. Recently, I saw some help in that regard in a new book, “ Think Like Amazon ,” by John Rossman, a former top executive at Amazon.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 21, 2019

In the classic book, “ Fish Can’t See Water ,” Kai Hammerich and Richard D. Incidentally, I love that book title, which seems to me applicable to most aspects of business (and even people), as well as business culture. The challenge during this phase is to stay innovative and agile. Geographic expansion. Efficiency and scale.

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YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Key ideas from the book include the following: 1. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development). Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.

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Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components?

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 14, 2013

In a new book, “ Fish Can’t See Water ,” Kai Hammerich and Richard D. Incidentally, I love that book title, which seems to me applicable to most aspects of business (and even people), as well as business culture. The challenge during this phase is to stay innovative and agile. Geographic expansion. Efficiency and scale.

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Dilution Merger Flash Global 187

The Startup Magazine

APRIL 11, 2019

All of us know in software companies that scrum is the most significant agile methodology for handling software projects. Scrum is a lightweight agile process framework used primarily for managing software development. Few authors have published books which provide a structured framework of scrum to implement in non-software projects.

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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. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent, I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

We just held our second session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Class 2: Some of the pre-class reading included watching the Secret History of Silicon Valley and reading selected chapters of Max Boot’s book, War Made New. The Technology-to-Weapons-Cycle.

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SoCal CTO

MAY 4, 2010

No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers – Business Plans versus Business Models - Steve Blank , April 8, 2010 The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , April 7, 2010 The tradeoff between open and closed - Chris Dixon , April 25, 2010 Not disruptive, and proud of it - A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing (..)

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 20, 2017

Rapid changes in technology, shifting customer expectations, disruptive business models, and quickly evolving regulations force organizations to innovate quickly and invest in new lines of business that will fuel future growth. And yet, we can’t afford to let fear, uncertainty, and doubt paralyze us. and Malaysia.

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Technical Review Malaysia Agile Employee 147

Feld Thoughts

JULY 8, 2013

A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. Our findings went into a book that we published in 2004 called The Visible Ops Handbook , which described how these organizations made their “good to great” transformation. Enter the Developers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." As Ive written previously , lean startups are built upon three main trends: Technology commoditization. Agile software development.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 18, 2019

As a business and entrepreneur advisor, I have no trouble getting owners and managers to agree that change is happening faster and faster in the consumer and technology world, requiring them to keep their business more agile , just to keep up. Crisis-driven agility is not enough today. Culture of purposefulness and decisiveness.

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Agile Leadership .Net Government 255

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

I’m teaching my first non-lean start up class in a decade at Stanford next week; Technology, Innovation and Modern War : Keeping America’s Edge in an Era of Great Power Competition. This was our first step in fostering a more agile, responsive and resilient, approach to national security in the 21st century.

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Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

In short, small teams can run fast and innovate because of their size and the fact that they’re not reliant on the technology from other teams. Facebook has created a culture of agility with a philosophy to “move fast and break things.” The 3 Books Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Asks His Senior Managers To Read (embargozone.com).

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API Architecture Agile Employee 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. (I Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

In a new book, “ The Leadership Capital Index ,” Dave Ulrich, a best-selling author, business consultant, and business school professor, provides some real insights and metrics on what makes up the elements of goodwill in the minds of top valuation experts. Strategic proficiency. Stable and friendly work environment.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 17, 2017

Of course, nobody really knows all of what tomorrow will bring, in terms of globalization, digital technology, or demographic shifts, but most experts agree that certain elements are already obvious, and things must be done today to get your business ready in time. Data technology facilitates more fact-based decisions.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Leadership Agile 139

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 15, 2017

Yet in this age of technology, many seem to favor tools and data to get the edge, or can’t find the time to talk to real people. I just finished a new book that highlights this approach, “ One Minute Mentoring ,” by the legendary business consultant Ken Blanchard, in concert with Claire Diaz-Ortiz.

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Technical Review Agile Social Media Networking 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I know plenty of people who prefer more advanced source control system, but my belief is that many agile practices diminish the importance of advanced features like branching. Its not that the idea behind them is wrong, but I think agile team-building practices make scheduling per se much less important. Youd better. Expo SF (May.

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Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

In building ESL Perry made a conscious choice to emulate Hewlett Packard (then considered the “gold standard” of a great technology company.) Forty years before Agile Development methodologies became popular, ESL had analysts from its &# customer&# sitting side-by-side with ESL engineers designing new equipment together.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. But the same technologies that make life difficult for traditional marketers also offer them unprecedented new opportunities.

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