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How do you figure out what’s the right mix of skills for the co-founders of your startup? I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. . Trying to figure out what the right set of co-founders isn’t so clear.
I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. My contract developers building the app aren’t very responsive. It takes weeks to make even a simple change.”.
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.
Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Lean was designed to inform the founders’ vision while they operated frugally at speed. ” Fire, Ready, Aim. He just hired Meg Whitman. The result?
. + 1,000 startup founders, investors, and press! Vinod Khosla Founder Dave McClure Founding Partner Eric Ries Author Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur & Professor Todd Park CTO Travis Kalanick CEO & Co-Founder Joe Zadeh Director of Product Sam Shank Co-Founder & CEO NEW!
Eric was the very first practitioner of my CustomerDevelopment methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Jon Sebastiani , founder and CEO of KRAVE Jerky , a company that got its start in my class at Berkeley back in 2011 and was recently acquired by Hershey. Taking My Class.
When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of CustomerDevelopment principles. Pair CustomerDevelopment with AgileDevelopment. Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders. No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers.
Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup FounderDeveloper Gap ? What went wrong?
female founders. founder friday. Lessons learned from female founders and women entrepreneurs. Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White on Building a Successful Startup » FounderDating: How I Found My Co-Founder. Tweet By Elizabeth Knopf (Co-Founder & CEO, Sorced). Conference 2012.
The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the CustomerDevelopment process are you on? CustomerDevelopment and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.
He started the Stanford Honors Co-op in 1954 which allowed companies in the valley to send their engineers to Stanford graduate engineering programs. And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Leo Beranek led the EAL and went on to co-found BBN. How was this possible? Order Here.
So will failing to understand your customers. Successful founders have a laser-like focus and commitment; a keen understanding of customers’ needs; and a tenacious spirit, said the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. Reetu Gupta. And download any of the past shows here.).
They are the co-authors of The Lean Entrepreneur , and the co-founders of the Moves the Needle Group , which advises the innovation practices of Fortune 100 companies. You have to go find your own customers to experiment with, you have your own brand, so you have to think like a Lean Startup.
There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.
Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agiledevelopment, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customerdevelopment that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.
It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customerdevelopment. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. If not your co-founders, someone outside the company.”.
A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The question was: what did the founders want to do? Will Harvey , Eric Ries and the other founders were unequivocal – “Screw the buy-out, we’re here to build a company. One founder quit and joined Google.) Go For Broke. The Scalable Startup.
These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the CustomerDevelopment process and what they learned about each part of their business model. The students were challenged to get users, orders, customers, etc.
“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.
Everyone I met in this program “gets” the principles of Agile, Lean and CustomerDevelopment big time. The TechArb is the engineering student accelerator/incubator (cofounded by the local VC ) and also embraces these ideas. The Center for Entrepreneurship in the Engineering School is akin to Stanford’s STVP program.
The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customerdevelopment and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) However, going through the customerdevelopment process showed me the danger in that kind of thinking.
I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. Co mpanies also face Wicked problems. In this case Wicked doesn’t mean morally evil, but refers to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious.
announced this evening at its annual Pitch Night , that it has received sponsorship by the Kauffman Foundation to support its "Founder Labs," a pre-incubator program whose mission is to increase the number of female founders of technology startups. Diverse Founding Teams, AgileDevelopment Techniques.
The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. At HP the founders were still at the company and still running the business.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agiledevelopment with customerdevelopment Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. Jim Murphy is a long-time agile practitioner in startups. But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully. Enter Jims post.
Outsourcing your startup’s early technical development to a dev shop is like riding an elephant in a horseback polo match. You’re on a big beast, but your lack of agility will prevent you from scoring. A dev shop is never a substitute for a technical co-founder.
Matt Weingart, program development manager in the Strategic Development Office at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Takashi Tsutsumi and Masato Iino , founders of Learning Entrepreneur’s Lab in Japan. The focus of our first segment is how Silicon Valley and the U.S.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 CustomerDevelopment Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.
In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. This is a minimum viable product.
This week, we again present startup guru Steve Blank , a highly-successful serial entrepreneur (with 30+ years of venture experience) and author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and co-author of The Startup Owners Manual. is getting out of the building and talking to hundreds of customers. You can’t fake that in a weekend.” (at 1:02).
I believe it is the best introduction to CustomerDevelopment you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of CustomerDevelopment and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.
I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.
Each has its own iterative process: customerdevelopment and agiledevelopment respectively. Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. And how do you pick a new direction?
As I evolved my thinking, I started to frame the problem this way: How can we devise a product development process that allows the business leaders to take responsibility for the outcome by making conscious trade-offs? When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer.
He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. October 13, 2008 6:47 PM Luke G said. Eric, love the blog.
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. Labels: customerdevelopment , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.
The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about. December 2, 2008 10:56 AM Ryan said.
I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal. Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action. I believe this is one reason why the myth of the dictatorial startup founder has such enduring appeal.
Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customerdevelopment? Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa.
If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customerdevelopment is in order? Labels: customerdevelopment , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customerdevelopment?
I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customerdevelopment process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong? Expo SF (May.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you. Expo SF (May.
It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Go on an agile diet quickly. More on that in a moment.
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