Steve Blank's Blog, page 58

Panic at the Pivot – Aligning Incentives By Burning the Boats

It's a paradox, but early sales success in a startup can kill its chances of becoming a large successful company. The cause is often sales and marketing execs who've become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. As a result they block new iterations of the business model that might take the company to the next level.

Fairchild
As I was reading a history of the startup years of Fairchild Semiconductor, I realized that a problem I thought was new –...

The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition

One of the ironies of being a startup is that when you are small no one can put you out of business but you. Paradoxically, as your revenues and market share increase the risk of competitors damaging your company increases.

Often the cause is the inability to grow the startup past the worldview of its founders.

We're Getting Our Butts Kicked
One of my ex-engineering students helped start a six-year old company headquartered in Los Angeles that sells to government agencies. (They had funded...

You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities

It took losing something important to understand the difference between a commodity and an opportunity. Along the way I also learned yet another way entrepreneurs see the world differently from their investors.

Advisory Board
In the early days of Rocket Science I realized that we needed high-level advice on multiple fronts; technology, game development, video game distribution, etc. At one of our initial board meetings we had agreed on the general principle of an advisory board and put...

Job Titles That Can Sink Your Startup

I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP's. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time articulating why.

Here's one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a large company.

You Can't Always Get What You Want
I hadn't seen Rajiv in the two years since he started his second company. He had raised a seed round and then a Series A from a name brand V...

Why Product Managers Wear Sneakers

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association.  It's a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example of an industry cluster.)

The published title of the talk was, "How to Create a $100M Business and Out Innovate your Competition."  I read that and ...

Why Product Managers Wear Sneakers

I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association.  It's a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example of an industry cluster.)

The published title of the talk was, "How to Create a $100M Business and Out Innovate your Competition."  I read that and ...

Boys Rules, Girls Lose – Women at Work

My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they've grown older, they've heard their parent's advice about women in the workforce.

This post is not advice nor is it a recommendation of what you should do. It's simply my interpretation of what I observed watching my daughters grow up. Our circumstances were unique, times have changed, and your conclusions and opinions will most certainly differ.

Gender Differences
Growing up in the 60's a...

The Non-Dummies Guide to Customer Discovery

Customer Development is a stupidly simple idea. It's one that you can describe in 30-seconds or less. But it took me 3 years and almost 300 pages of 10-point type to describe the concept in my book The Four Steps to the Epiphany.  Unlike a traditional business book, The Four Steps is more akin to a reference manual for how to "engineer" a startup – from the initial search for a repeatable business model all the way through the management techniques to transition to a company. Entrepreneurs...

Solving the Innovator's Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

One of the ways I learn is to teach. My students ask questions I can't answer and challenge me to solve problems I never considered. At times I'll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast.

My last session was with a passionate, smart, entrepreneurial team from a Fortune 100 company. (And if I told you who they were I'd have to kill you.) ...

How Customer Development Failed Us

One of the attributes of great entrepreneurs is that they are tenacious and relentless. This guest post is from Andrew Elliott of Lottay. Andrew read the Four Steps to the Epiphany, tracked me down at California Coastal Commission hearing in Santa Barbara, and had me meeting with him in a stairwell during a break in my day-long meeting.

Here's his story of when Customer Development failed.

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Hi, we're Lottay!  We've been a startup for the past two years or so and we've come to a critical...