SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc.

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

An existing company or government organization is primarily organized for day-to-day execution of its current business processes or mission. In reality for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed a process from start to deployment. There’s a much better way. Three common mistakes.

Incubator 319

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 319

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. Of all the Chinese government programs, the Torch Program is the one program that kick-started Chinese high-tech innovation and startups. It did so by building a national network of a 1,000+ Productivity Promotion Centers. Venture Guiding Fund.

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

– while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the story of a team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery.

Lean 417

Lean Security Asia SBIR 417

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2021

Pete is now CEO of BMNT, a company that delivers innovation solutions and processes for governments. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force Pete Newell delivered innovation at speed and scale in the Department of Defense. Here are Pete’s 5 principles that will accelerate innovation.

Curation 353

Curation Technical Review Lean Australia 353

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Small startups act the same way, simply cloning each other’s products. The Chinese government must be laughing hysterically over U.S. When the Chinese government censors (run by their propaganda department ) shutdown access to yet another U.S. Most of their parents still tell them to work for the government or a big company.

China 220

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 220

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks. Eric Ries will interview him.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

The first few months of my startups were centered around building the founding team, prototyping the product and raising money. I’m convinced that starting a company without talking to customers is like throwing your time and money in the street (unless you’re already a domain expert). Fundraising isn’t the product.

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 208

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

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! Seth Sternberg Co-Founder & CEO Scott Chacon CIO Kevin Hale Senior Product Manager NEW!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

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. I’m not buying it… literally.

Silicon Valley 215

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Palantir is a deep technical play and we had a lot of code to write just to fill out the product vision that we had already validated with potential customers; it took us two straight years of development to go from early prototypes to software that could be used in production. So what was going on?

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

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. Product Friday: Monetizing Content is a Product Problem - This is going to be BIG. m the f%*kin’ boss.”. Same goes for television.

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

32 students were scattered across the globe and given a seemingly impossible assignment- they had 10 weeks to understand and then solve a real Dept of Defense problem – by interviewing 100 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, et al while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products – all while never leaving their room.

Oakland 315

Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The time to product and scale of investment is radically different than other startup markets.&# Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. You’re a startup, just get your product out the door.” It has a vocabulary.

Vertical 159

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 159

The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

We see this all the time at Forward Partners where we invest right from the idea stage and most of the companies get a first version of their product live for less than £30k (that generally includes founder salaries and time spent doing customer research). The second development is SEIS and EIS.

Early Stage 119

Early Stage Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review 119

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

ASC starts building product, but as they get into the thick of it, the team realizes executing on their vision is going to be extremely hard. Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. Heads down on product, they say. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging.

Burn Rate 153

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 153

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. How could it go wrong? Little did I know. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

government to help them innovate faster– not just kind of fast, but 10x the number of initiatives in 1/5 the time. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. A 50x speedup kind of fast.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. The Business Plan is Dead.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

Amazed at all the beautifully designed products that came out of only 76 hours. We all know these people, most often working at large corporates or even the government. People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the top tech blogs without spending $3,000 on some fancy PR agency.

Netherlands 159

Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

Yet everyone – investors, entrepreneurs, academics — expected new startups to follow the same practices that worked for large companies – write a business plan, forecast 5-year sales projections and build the product without ever talking to customers. The National Science Foundation adopted it.

Lean 224

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 224

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Im writing this post from an airplane headed to Washington DC, where Ill be presenting at the Government 2.0 Im especially curious to gauge the reaction of the civilian and military representatives of our government. Ive been in a few government-themed meetings recently, so I know some of the standard answers.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2013

by Dan Adams , president of Advanced Industrial Marketing and author of “ New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth “ Right now our economy and our nation feel anything but business-friendly. Innovation isn’t about flinging products willy-nilly against the wall to see what sticks.

Product 251

Product B2B Product Development Developer 251

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. Product Hunt, an 18-month old startup, has evolved from a basic idea into a thriving online community. Check out his post on how he launched Product Hunt, a story captured in tweets, emails, and photos.

Lean 60

Lean United States Fractional CTO Startup 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 25, 2021

A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency. Inspired by her own work problem, she talked to her peers and other stakeholders, built multiple minimum viable products, and figured out how to get engineering, policy, legal, security and everyone else in the enterprise to actually approve it.

Non-Compete 436

Non-Compete Government Incubator Design 436

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

SneakerLabs’ first product was a Java-based chat server and client. Since I had good connections with the University, we got a lot of feedback on how the product could be improved to meet their needs. We listened to their feedback and started adding features to the product accordingly. The product worked. Not so fast.

Revenue 72

Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2013

Research universities also became an integral part of the military ecosystem as the federal government pumped billions into supporting science. Science and startups have come a long way since the 1980’s when the Chinese government owned everything and controlled it through a central planning system. Lessons Learned. Like the U.S.

China 322

China Taiwan Silicon Valley Guam 322

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 334

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2013

We figured our key partners would include consumers (to contribute data much like Wikipedia’s users), manufacturers (to keep their product information updated) and the US government (to supply datasets to power our content). Lean Start-up Connection: Customer Development. Lean Start-up Connection: Agile Development.

Lean 302

Lean Agile Customer Development SEO 302

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

They use the Business Model (or Mission Model ) Canvas to keep track of their key hypotheses and then rapidly test them by talking to customers and iterating their Minimal Viable Products. This allows them to quickly find product/market fit. state laws that are applicable in one state are imposed by state government.

Marketing 326

Marketing Startup Government SEC 326

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). Too much of this data is non- actionable.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

Sigh… What I should have been hearing is the search for the business model, specifically the progress on product/market fit, but I hear the fund raising story first at least 90% of the time. Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers?

Venture Capital 335

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 335