Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Unique to Finland with its strong cultural emphasis on equality and the redistribution of wealth is a business press that doesn’t understand startups and is overtly hostile to their success.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Just as with any company, the most important issue is the team; see “ How to Negotiate a Partner Role at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Firm “ . See How Private Equity and Venture Capital Investors Are Eating Their Own Dogfood. . 3) Raise capital. 4) Originate investments. 6) Due diligence.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Just as with any company, the most important issue is the team; see “ How to Negotiate a Partner Role at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Firm “ . See How Private Equity and Venture Capital Investors Are Eating Their Own Dogfood. . 3) Raise capital. 4) Originate investments. 6) Due diligence.

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Technical Review Private Equity Management Cap Table 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

You think startups are hard? These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis.

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. 9-to-5 Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

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.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). Her first startup, Pencil You In, grew from a personal need to schedule hair appointments.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A lot of entrepreneurs think that their startup is the next big thing when in reality they’re just building a small business. How can you tell if your startup has the potential to be the next Google, Intel or Facebook? A first order filter is whether the founders are aiming for a scalable startup. The Scalable Startup.

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www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Home About Contact My thoughts & lessons learned on startups, entrepreneurship, marketing and other stuff. Changing Equity Structures for Early Startup Employees Tweet Recently someone asked me for advice on how much equity they should give to their early employees. Those first employees will take 0.5-1%

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. He previously founded N&N Investments LLC, a real estate investment holding company; and is a program leader and fellow of the Startup Leadership Program. .

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 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 the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. Startups here are primarily in what they call the TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) segment.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

The key things I want students to take from the class are: Understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner. Tags: Durant versus Sloan: Startups Verus Companies.

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YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 14, 2013

Amsterdam-based startup accelerator Rockstart last year launched a program to find and support ten teams of startup founders in Europe. Of the ten startups in the inaugural 2012 class, four have raised follow-on funding to date, and one even reached the break-even point and expanded to Silicon Valley.

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Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

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Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. The motivation in the mid 1950’s for these new startups was a crisis – we were in the midst of the cold war , and the United States military and intelligence agencies were rearming as fast as they could.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 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 the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. Startups here are primarily in what they call the TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) segment.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. Stay out of startups. I just want to do strategy.” Those were very short interviews.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If your don’t have enough employees on the payroll, hire relatives, friends, or part-timers and train them. You’ll never have to do it again.) Everyone should understand your goals, your messages, your demos and your theme and know their role. Trade Show Post Mortem Evaluate the experience. Physical booth: What worked?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Disruptive innovations are coming from startups – Telsa for automobiles, Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotel rentals, Netflix for video rentals and Facebook for media. Which brings us to the fourth reason it’s harder for large corporations to offer disruptive breakthroughs: startups. Startups are unencumbered by the status quo.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The close tie between the two labs was a unique aspect of the Stanford Lab.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already. Maybe the core of what you talk about in getting companies to success lies in the answer to these 2 questions. Oh, I absolutely love your “I was having coffee with person the other day&# stories. Keep ‘em coming.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

(Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) 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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I’ve paraphrased his speech into the language of a startup. Startups are inherently chaos. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.) It’s eerily similar.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

I ultimately answered that call, joining Sun Microsystems with a 3-digit employee number. And now am leading a startup of my own ( [link] ) where we’re students of you and Eric Ries’ lean startup principles. invention of electronic warfare, part I and [.] Thanks for connecting the historical dots!

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www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

Home About Contact My thoughts & lessons learned on startups, entrepreneurship, marketing and other stuff. The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. Think about the baseball Steroid scandal, Tour de France doping scandal, housing bubble, etc.) Think through if you want to win at any cost.

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SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us.

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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. Of all the Chinese government programs, the Torch Program is the one program that kick-started Chinese high-tech innovation and startups. In these series of 5 posts, I thought I’d share what I learned in China.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) It was still a year away from its IPO. Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do.

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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. Of all the Chinese government programs, the Torch Program is the one program that kick-started Chinese high-tech innovation and startups. In these series of 5 posts, I thought I’d share what I learned in China.

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

And Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture is a huge help to startup founders. It follows the entrepreneurial journeys of founders sharing their experiences of what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries to entrepreneurial education and more. Dave : Exactly.

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Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

Endlessly curious, I went from startups in military intelligence to microprocessors to supercomputers to video games. As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. With every startup came increasing responsibility. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t buy our products.

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