Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2013

But the founders also recognized – as many great founders do – that they were going to have to build out an experienced management team to become the billion company everybody believes this can be. The media world now has its own leader running the largest YouTube multi-channel network startup. New Online Video Trends.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. But part of his life that that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry is that Bill Perry used Silicon Valley to help end the cold war.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. I hope we managed to teach our children compassion and charity for others. Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner.

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The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. Working for a startup is a unique experience and it’s not for everyone.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs. We were sitting in our cheap hotel room when the phone rang.

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David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

A friend of mine interviewed for a job with massively successful hedge fund manager Steven A. Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. – Thoughtful fund management. Investing is a completely different skillset from being a good manager.

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David Teten

JANUARY 9, 2018

A friend of mine interviewed for a job with massively successful hedge fund manager Steven A. Many VCs focus on specific verticals, usually based on the sector in which a VC initially made her reputation. – Thoughtful fund management. Investing is a completely different skillset from being a good manager.

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Venture Capital Private Equity Silicon Valley Differentiation 60

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place to reduce risk.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

These posts cover two distinct periods – the first, the rise of “ Microwave Valley ” chronicles the decade of 1946-1956 as Stanford University became the hub of military/industry contracting in the Bay Area. . ————– These posts will make a lot more sense if you look at the earlier Secret History posts.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.”

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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 Stay out of startups. Just as an aside, over my career I must have interviewed scores of business school graduates (some from the very fine universities where I now teach) who would say, “I want to do strategy.” I just want to do strategy.”

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Reply Dan , on June 4, 2009 at 7:55 pm Said: Great story — reminds me of one I witnessed, very analogous but about 15 years later: I was working on a digital music startup around ’98, ( [link] ) and pitched it to then CEO of mp3.com Little did we know.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. Then it hit me – no one else wanted to be manager – what was the worst that could happen? What’s the Worst that Can Happen? All I had to do was ask.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

And that most of the post on trade shows was describing how to prepare and manage a physical presence in a trade show booth. These two posts were amazing. Reply steveblank , on May 22, 2009 at 2:39 pm Said: Morteza, The comments about “ignore this post&# were meant that if your sales channel is the web you rarely go to trade shows.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject.

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Version One Ventures

JANUARY 2, 2019

Each week we like share our thoughts on a range of topics from vertical markets to general startup advice and our reflections on investing. Running a Startup. Changing the narrative on distributed teams in Silicon Valley”. The risks of scaling too fast too soon”. So you just raised a….” three-part blog series.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture.

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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. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.”

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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. It’s eerily similar. It may not be for you.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 21, 2010

The word conjures images of twenty-something graduate students hacking code in a Silicon Valley dorm room, fueled by a steady supply of Red Bull and Ramen. The vertical axis measures the “percentage of individuals. Tags: entrepreneur startup boomer business. By Akira Hirai Entrepreneurship.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Posted on December 3, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups I’ve had my ideas “stolen” twice. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “ Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.” Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Austin Startup

JUNE 27, 2017

For investors outside of Austin and LPs: Austin is a a vibrant startup market and this list of capital sources can help you identify firms to co-invest with and funds to invest in. We’ve compiled a definitive list of sources of startup capital in Austin. Corsa Ventures fits this criteria.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. So much so that after I started teaching I’d ask, “Can anybody recognize this model of startups?

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David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

Since 2017 we’ve managed $3 million in revenue-based financing, which helps cash-strapped technology companies grow. We provide revenue-based funding and business acceleration support to service-based small businesses located outside of major capital markets such as Silicon Valley and New York City.”. “We

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. The guy who replaced him invented the idea of the modern corporation. Understanding the future of entrepreneurship may depend on understanding the contribution each of them made in the past.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. Most publishers are still caught up in an outdated “vision vs. metrics&# argument, which is already obsolete here in Silicon Valley.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. Posted on April 2, 2009 by steveblank A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics. And in a big company most of it is illegal and can have enormous consequences. A final note. Do the right thing.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

As one could imagine this was the last thing the supercomputer center management wanted to hear. I responded to their RFP by proposing that Ardent build the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center a distributed supercomputing environment with hundreds of Ardent personal supercomputers rather than a monolithic Cray supercomputer.

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