Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

In addition to the one in Beijing, China has set up 53 additional industrial parks and in them are ~60,000 companies with 8 million employees. Innofund applicants have to be in high-tech R&D, have less than 500 people, at least 30% of the employees have to be technical and the majority of the company owned by Chinese.

Programming 287

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 287

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time. The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. I asked why.

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

You find early stage employees expecting to work normal hours, to get paid a regular salary, and not asking or expecting equity. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. There isn’t much of a killer instinct among the masses.

Finland 332

Finland Naming Russia Government 332

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 25, 2023

A common initiative I hear from business owners today is their effort to improve the customer experience. Some are doing this at the expense of employee experience , which I believe is one of the major causes of employee dissatisfaction and exit of good employees today. Responsive – empower employees to help peers.

Employee 282

Employee Matching Customer Leadership 282

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

At Tekes, government employees (and their hired consultants) – with no equity, no risk or reward, no startup or venture capital experience – try to pick startup winners and losers. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Technology , Venture Capital.

Finland 329

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 329

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company. If you’re not a founder (by choice, timing or temperament,) you may be an early employee or a later stage startup employee. If you’re unsure, you’ve just decided.)

Cofounder 230

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.

Silicon Valley 309

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 309

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Turnover of employees in capital in Beijing is very high. Employees work here for a few months and are suddenly gone. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' It usually doesn’t end well.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 328

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In theory when you went public, everyone’s shares were now tradable on the stock exchange, but usually the underwriters required a six month “lockup” when company insiders (employees and investors) couldn’t sell. Or were they trained and raised in the bubble and M&A hype and still looking for some shortcut to liquidity?

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

In addition to the one in Beijing, China has set up 53 additional industrial parks and in them are ~60,000 companies with 8 million employees. Innofund applicants have to be in high-tech R&D, have less than 500 people, at least 30% of the employees have to be technical and the majority of the company owned by Chinese.

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. The idea of intention is that if employees understand the thinking behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your life and your choices. Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in Silicon Valley. You created it and own it.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Companies of note Learn from companies that have been through the fire--and have lessons to share. Aditya Agarwal has lived through startup hypergrowth--twice. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. Even outliers like WhatsApp (sold for $19b with 55 employees) and Instagram (sold for $1b with 13 employees) raised lots of venture funds. simple enough to be self-service).

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

For most of your customers, tech support is the only human interaction they'll have with you. Are you really going to leave that up to your worst-treated, least-paid, least-qualified employees? Tech support is sales. At Smart Bear we made millions of dollars in both individual and enterprise sales without "sales.".

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Turnover of employees in capital in Beijing is very high. Employees work here for a few months and are suddenly gone. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' It usually doesn’t end well.

China 220

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 220

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

On Customer Development in a growing company, Wyatt offered the following advice: Wyatt: We''ve employed a number of systems in the organization that keep all of us close to the customer. There are 5-10 customers in our office (or remote) per week for developers, product owners and marketers to speak to and validate learning.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. They are very hands on.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

While that’s gratifying, the fact is that most people are ill suited to survive in the wild as founders or early employees. I also teach a less intense introduction class for engineers called the Spirit of Entrepreneurship and the Customer Development Class at Berkeley which I’ll describe in a future post.)

Business Model 236

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 236

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. Instead, five whys kept leading to problems caused by an improperly trained new employee, and wed make a small adjustment. What is customer development?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Think about it: Companies hire people who come from outside the buyer’s world and don’t share his interests — employees, agencies, consultants, and the like — and expect them to persuade buyers to hand over their money. Yeah, right!

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. Now is a full-time employee that works for the operation, but that was a relatively recent circumstance: before he was hired, he volunteered his time.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. This means hiring/contracting a freelance web developer or an agency to design and develop your site from start to finish.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 25, 2014

7 Reasons You Can’t Be Friends With Your Employees – crowdspring.co/1jrrWok. The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. A 3-Day Weekend…Every Weekend? 1jrpLBf.

Social Media 92

Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

I ultimately answered that call, joining Sun Microsystems with a 3-digit employee number. Had not yet heard of Silicon Valley at the time, but the siren call was already sounding. My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. Thanks for connecting the historical dots!

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 210

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

We eventually discovered (via five whys ) that we also had to get each new employee acculturated to a fearless way of thinking. Because this was such a big cultural change for most new employees, we didnt leave them to sink or swim on their own. For one, it required us to keep our developer sandbox setup procedure simple and automated.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I would add, though, a further question: Do new employees write code on their first day? So if an employee pushed code that broke the site, wed ask: why didnt our cluster immune system catch that? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Completely necessary.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Customer Development , Science and Industrial Policy. Fast forward to today.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." Blank teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and UC Berkeley and blogs at steveblank.com.

Finland 158

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

That institution will touch many people in its life: customers, investors, employees, and everyone they touch as well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155