Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. The previous post described how China built its science and technology infrastructure. This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. All the usual caveats apply.

Programming 287

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 287

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.

Lean 263

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. Large companies were acquiring technology startups just to get in the game at the same absurd prices.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

Over time, innovations outside the company (demographic, cultural, new technologies, etc.) The company loses customers, then revenues and profits decline and it eventually gets acquired or goes out of business. valued by their existing customers – fairly well. outpace an existing company’s business model.

Search 251

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 251

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended.

Silicon Valley 309

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 309

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 261

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 261

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

They knew the technology trendsetters in their fields and got us in front of them. In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one.

Engineer 224

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 224

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc. It is the key to “customer development” that Steve Blank talks about. I’m going to save that for a future blog post.

PR 279

PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

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.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. The previous post described how China built its science and technology infrastructure. This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. All the usual caveats apply.

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 328

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 328

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.) You created it and own it.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

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. I feel that I’ve derived as much value from this post as I would from reading 2 or 3 lengthy books on the topic. The Sharp End of the Stick? It became [.]

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup. Twenty years and 100,000’s of copies of those books later, my life has fortuitously intersected with Steve Blank once again now that we’ve both become educators.

Maryland 280

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 280

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. Bill Gross founded Idealab in 1996, making it the longest-running technology incubator alive today.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one.

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 208

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

I didn’t recognize the behavior at the time, but anyone who loves technology and gadgets has at one time or another has bought a technology toy – USB memory sticks, iPod Shuffles, umbrellas with LED lights, alarm clocks that talked, Flip Video Cameras, etc. We accidently had a product with the Novelty Effect.

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. You’re not joining a big company.

Cofounder 230

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 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 (..)

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

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.

Restful 249

Restful Silicon Valley San Jose Puerto Rico 249

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) It was my ex boss from Convergent Technologies, “Steve we’ve all just resigned from Convergent and we’re starting a new company.

North Carolina 133

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 133

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.” Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

Vertical 167

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We had been attempting to compete by their rules with the same types of technology messages. Up until now all the graphics board companies supplied “technology”, and it was up to the customers to figure out which of these arcane specs was best for their business.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. At ESL Military Intelligence Was No Longer an Oxymoron Perry not only took his best managers, but he also took his customers, and his desire to build a company culture that was the antithesis of working for a phone company.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

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. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. She posted her notes from the talk here.)

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 278

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner. Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 156

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.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 210

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. 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).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Moore’s technology adoption lifecycle tells us to find a client. Build the client’s visualization with your technology, but your technology is not the product. The products you develop in the bowling alley are there to carry your technology and get it adopted. No, linearity in business is a tragic myth.

Vertical 159

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 159

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 220

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 220

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

It is pity that I can’t get hold of your book because it’s not available in a local bookstore (in the Philippines). Reply steveblank , on March 23, 2009 at 12:11 am Said: Alvin, you can buy the book online at [link] They ship to the Philippines. i have your book, but stopped at the 4th chapter.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 150

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. 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.

Customer Development 255

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 255

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

MBA or Domain Expert Years later when I was running marketing departments I came up with a heuristic that replicated my own hire: in a technology company it’s usually better to train a domain expert to become a marketer than to train an MBA to become a domain expert. Thanks Steve!

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120