Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In the Fall of 2008, the credit crisis wiped out mergers and acquisitions as a path to liquidity as M&A collapsed with the rest of the market. The formula for exits was a variation of the formula they used in the Internet bubble, morphing into: brand, hype and sell the company. So what’s left?

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We We need your decision now because we are about to spend $50,000 on new collateral.”

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Its Woz-inspired creativity set the tone for the rest of the project.&#

Silicon Valley 146

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. 12comments: Dougvs said.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. Some of these problems began with the 19th century Romanticist notion of artists as mad geniuses, in elevated isolation from the rest of us. People need to be left alone sometimes because they need other people.

Entrepreneur 295

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 295

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

And the rest is history. Mike may have “fathered&# FM-CW OTH ardar at Stanford and SRI, but the rest of OTH radar technology had its beginnings at NRL, Raytheon, Sylvania, and ITT. Gorbachev, now the Soviet Premier, had to grapple with the spiraling cost of military systems that weren’t amortized by consumer purchases.

Silicon Valley 201

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. By the time I came back to the United States, he was gone from the company.

Silicon Valley 215

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. Reply Dave Goulden , on March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm Said: I love the redefinition of the market.

Silicon Valley 161

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Therefore I’m not sure what to make of the rest of their conclusions. That may be the case for the 549 founders they interviewed, but only 4.5% of total entrepreneurs born in China and India is not even close to what entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley looks like. steve Michael F.

Founder 312

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant. And even if you did it’s the wrong focus, and time spent for a startup 2. If winning $5-10K is your goal, you’re not a scalable startup, just a small business.

Business Plan 160

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 160

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines. Unlike vertical or diagonal lines, they look as though gravity has already acted upon them and there is nowhere for them to fall. Unlike vertical or diagonal lines, they look as though gravity has already acted upon them and there is nowhere for them to fall.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

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VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 26, 2024

When it comes to Generative AI, the incumbents are not resting on their laurels. Google is also leaning in on AI Agents. Vertical AI agents – automate workflows in specific industries (say health or industrial). For example, take Salesforce.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI Cofounder Security Stealth 78

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

sgblank Lean Startup Cirle 111909 This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback. Reply Mark Essel , on November 25, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: Diggin’ the presentation so far, looking forward to catching the rest of this later in the day. Big thanks for the continued sharing, and certainly the link to Lean Startups.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Austin Startup

OCTOBER 22, 2017

It’s such a difficult and often counterintuitive game that the more time and attention you devote to accepting guidance at the beginning, the more misery you will be spared in your golfing career for the rest of your days.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Incubator Software Review Vertical 48

ConversionXL

AUGUST 21, 2015

Our cognitive process leans towards understanding objects in their simplest form. Which is why banner ads need to stand out from the rest of the site elements in order be easily spotted. In November 2014, Google published findings that suggest vertical ad units are the most viewable. Larger size helps users actually see the ad.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Vertical Advertising 48

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war. I hope all is well with you and the rest of the Blank clan. Shut up and keep fixing that equipment.”

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. But the standard deviations are very wide because sometimes the student doesn’t bother to perform on the exams or papers because they’ve satisfied their own curiosity and have moved on to something else (another course, &c.). This was basically my m.o.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

A mobile-optimized structure, however, leans towards a “taller” arrangement in addition to hierarchies. In each page, seek one sentence that sums up the rest of the page. Traditional hierarchies branch from the home page (general overview) to sub-pages (specific information). But each page stands alone.

Mobile 101

Mobile HTML Flash Software Review 101

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

At the end of a run I used to lay out and relax on the rocks to rest – at least I did, until the guards asked if I knew that there were more poisonous things per square foot here than anywhere in the world.) Yet if turned my head the other way, I’d stare out at a landscape that was untouched by humans. It shunned publicity.

Silicon Valley 280

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 280

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 140

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. So the norms that we have were a combination of bottoms-up and then some top-down leaning. On the other side, we decided to lean into delivering in a big way, so we bought Postmates.

Iran 41

Iran Technical Review Non-Compete Lean 41

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

Silicon Valley 231

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 207

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Martin , on October 5, 2009 at 9:11 am Said: I am curious to hear the rest of what Steve will have to say about Durant and Sloan. Falling shy of creating AND building a great company, I have to give points to those who did either one, and on that score Durant and Sloan remain high in my pantheon. Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point.

Entrepreneur 334

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 334

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. No one was confused after that. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 133

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. It was so out of character, people were shocked. Some stammered out, “can you say that again?&#

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Duct Tape Marketing

JULY 18, 2023

So put a vertical line down the center and on the top of the left hand column, put words to lose on top of the right hand column, put words to use. We could argue for the rest of the day about who dropped the ball on this. She opens the window and she leans out. It really is the quickest way to make complex ideas.

South Korea 69

South Korea Artificial Inteligence Audio Networking 69

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

However, the mistake would be to confuse the interest in consumer facing companies with mass interest in the rest of corporate America. It may happen, but its not there yet. (As As a test search twitter for tweets about non-consumer companies on the Fortune 500.)

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 149

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. Is it a given that the “lean, hungry&# culture can actually be maintained forever? Don’t let it happen to you.

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 233

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 5, 2014

Masterful execution makes up one of the triangle’s two vertical sides. (I Rest assured these meetings aren’t spent with everyone in agreement, congratulating each other on their perfect ideas. Story can create legends that an entire workplace culture can build upon, grow with, and lean on. First, what is the “soft edge”?

Algorithm 174

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. The rest of us have some fine dining to enjoy. I doubt anything can beat it the rest of this year. It’s like arguing against vertical software. Self-aggrandizing blowhards like yourself are a dime a dozen.

Java 107

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Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Other tools, can provide more dimensions including children, political leanings, ethnicity etc… You can see how this might be a lot more interesting for a magazine or content sites, and perhaps a lot less to other types of businesses. I find this behavior to be a million times more useful than demographics or political leanings.

Metrics 60

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