Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Therefore, no, we weren’t really equipped to be the low cost provider. A key lesson is that as an entrepreneur, you get to choose your segment. No, not really. And we lost money when we did so. Glad to see you blogging!

Silicon Valley 161

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. were the first computer entrepreneurs here. This was just before the IBM PC hit the desktop so there were no “standard” operating systems or applications for desktop platforms.

Technology 146

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 146

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

Your best bet is probably taking an existing market and serving a portion of it better than the competition, through lower cost or a different set of features. Slightly off-topic, there’s a good example of an entrepreneur going through the “Discovery/Validation&# process for a web business that charges for its product here.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

customers aren’t buying it, the cost of distribution is too high, etc.) The Focus on a Finished Product Rather than a Minimum Feature Set The passion of an entrepreneur coupled with the product development diagram drives you to believe that all you need to do is build the product (in all its full-featured glory) and customers will come.

Customer Development 246

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. That kind of accountable.

Silicon Valley 272

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 272

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard. Terman became a consultant to the company.

Silicon Valley 201

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

The San Diego-based startup has developed vertically integrated system that produces a plant-based protein ingredient that can replace egg whites, whey and casein in food and beverage applications. Be respectful, honest and transparent with people as you never know how much time, effort and energy it cost them to get where they are.

San Diego 62

San Diego Memphis AJAX Netherlands 62

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.) This means they could fund other non-military academic programs from this overhead. The Stanford Applied Electronics Lab built prototypes which were handed off to the military labs for their evaluation.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 159

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. We needed a way to shut down the German Air Defense system.

Silicon Valley 211

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 211

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent.

North Carolina 165

North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 165

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know have they distribute their product? Do you know how they create demand?

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves Part of my problem was that my reality distortion field encompassed my relationships. While she stuck it out for seven years, she had no connection to the passion and excitement that was driving me; all she saw was a tired and stressed entrepreneur when I got home. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

Entrepreneur 296

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 296

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. Durant was an amazing entrepreneur.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I I avoid these entrepreneurs like the plague.) And we decided not to. And here’s why. Culture matters. A final note.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Who recommends a sale?

Lean 264

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 264

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 207

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Describe this model to entrepreneurs who have taken their companies all the way to a large profitable business, and you’ll get heads nodding in recognition. Even more surprising, while the Customer Development model may sound like a new idea for entrepreneurs, it shares many features with a U.S.

Customer Development 256

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 256

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Combined with product costs, an engineering budget, and schedules, this results in a spreadsheet that faintly resembles the first financial plan in the company’s business plan. With that information in hand, Engineering estimates delivery dates and development costs.

Silicon Valley 272

Silicon Valley Product Startup RSS 272

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.) This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting. Ownership and Teamwork not turf.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 159

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

On first glance it appears as if they are spending to much energy in the vertical portion of the jump, relative to the horizontal portion. Stotting consists of fleeing via a jumping behavior that appears to be sub-optimal. Look at the drug warriors and the drug cartels. Eventually that whole struggle will have to go the way of prohibition.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 271

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.” I think a lot of entrepreneurs speak with such enthusiasm about thier own ideas that they may inadvertently illicit invalid responses. KC Reply steveblank , on September 10, 2009 at 11:20 am Said: Ken, 1.

Customer Development 223

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 223

Austin Startup

MARCH 4, 2018

We’re at a strategic point where our core business is experiencing solid growth and we’re ready to invest in significantly more advanced breathomics sensing and analytics into our roadmap, so we can begin to focus on the specific disease verticals that our data, reach and technology can have the greatest impact for. I attended in 2007.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco Startup China India 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

I am a young entrepreneur here, absolutely dying to hear the talk. And many of the best entrepreneurs experience failure a number of times before building a legendary business (thanks Steve Blank, you’re an info sharing rockstar). The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes.

Venture Capital 246

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 246

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

And throughout my career as an entrepreneur I kept asking questions of my VC investors and friends; Where did entrepreneurship come from? They were all fun reads about plucky entrepreneurs who start from nothing and against all odds, build a successful company. Was it because entrepreneurs keep moving forward and rarely look back?

Silicon Valley 303

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. I offered to introduce him to the firm whose Entrepreneur-in-Residence offer I had just accepted.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 14, 2024

Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. I was actually on a sales trip in California and my business partner called me back. 07:06): And he said, all these online entrepreneurs, all these agency owners, these SaaS founders, they don't like to do sales. We didn't even know.

Technical Review 74

Technical Review Software Review Sales Cloud 74

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

Silicon Valley 215

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# The problem, I believe, is that repeatability represents the extreme discomfort zone of this class of entrepreneur. the manager followed us still yelling. I’ve been surprised at the data. Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Founder 313

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 313

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Waiting for images to move around the screen were not only driving them crazy, but costing them money. The good news was that the Spif strategy was working; the bad news is that it was costing the company our entire profit. And by more than anything, I mean that the word performance came up time and again from these professionals.

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 26, 2019

California retains its rank as one of the most desirable states to live in, despite untenable property prices, high taxes, and a cornucopia of social issues. California homeowners are selling up and moving East, to neighboring states. California’s loss is Nevada and Arizona’s gain. In San Francisco, that figure is $1.4

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Oakland Developer California 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

We can put both little- and big-endian in the chip, and it won’t cost us more than 1,000 gates.” At best it is a way to inform an entrepreneurs instinct and reduce risk. Entrepreneurs with vision essentially make a hypothesis, as Steve says, to fill a need state… and new products and services are born. It’s an art.

Customer Development 288

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 288

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Are his costs in control? It’s a company that’s lost sight of the values that got it there. Don’t let it happen to you. Stay hungry, stay lean. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. Is the story over? The same principles operate in living as in business.

Silicon Valley 233

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

Reed Hastings of Netflix has said, “It’s not a strategy if failing in it doesn’t actually cost you something real.” Pivots can be high-cost, but they can also be high-reward. That’s why one of the factors that separates successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs is their pivot “tool chest.” HOW DO I KNOW WHEN IT’S TIME TO PIVOT?

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. Essentially, we decided that here’s this stuff that we’re going to do (which is mobility and delivery) through partnerships that would allow us to lower our cost base pretty significantly.

Iran 41

Iran Technical Review Non-Compete Lean 41

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. When Steve left AOL he wanted to be very involved with the next generation of entrepreneurs. A contemporary analog to this type of vertical integration is Comcast/NBC-U.

Cofounder 277

Cofounder Merger Founder Venture Capital 277