HN user
http://steveblank.com/about/
I was honored to have worked with Cleve at Ardent Computer. He ran the benchmark and demo group squeezing performance out of thin air.
Great mathematician and a wonderful human being. I never stopped learning when I was around him. thttps://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/11/25/the-ardent-tita...
If you're interested in the history of how the Poles and then British not only cracked the German Enigma Cipher machine used in world war 2, but then operationalized the interception, decryption and dissemination process - this is the place. There's quite a bit written about how the Enigma cipher system worked, but it isn't until you get to Bletchley Park do you understand the size, scope and scale of how they turned decryption of intercepted messages into an industrial process that gave the Allies a strategic edge in WW2. A must visit next time you're in London (35 minute train from Euston station, 5 minute walk to the museum.)
Decades later I discover I was his first boss
Very helpful. I'll update the post tomorrow. thanks.
Help make the paper better. What are some better exemplars for technology?
LOL At this point of my career I was the VP of Marketing of Convergent's Unix division which included the Miniframe. Our ad for the product - which I think I still have - said, "It's not how big it is, it's how well it performs."
We all stood on clayton christensen’s shoulders. Today we lost a giant. RIP.
The Jonathan concept of modular slices was a copy of the Convergent Technologies NGEN family of computers. frogdesign sold Apple the same packaging they had done two years earlier for Convergent. See the product family here: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/...
Yep
Brings back fond memories. My second job in Silicon Valley was manager of Zilog's training and education department (all of five of us) and taught customers how to design systems around the Z80 which included the CTC. see: https://steveblank.com/category/zilog/
A common problem with governments and government data, there is no adequate startup taxonomy. See https://steveblank.com/2011/09/01/why-governments-don’t-get-...
Kathryn Gould, the real author of the post was one of my mentors. She was one of the first woman VC's in the valley and hated being reminded of it. She said she wanted to be known as one of the best VC's - period - and she was. Her commencement speech at the University of Chicago is worth a read. https://steveblank.com/2014/08/05/pioneering-women-in-ventur... She passed on way too early in 2015.
The Intel Inside campaign wasn't just a consumer branding strategy. First and foremost it was a predatory marketing campaign that turned into exclusionary behavior. PC firms that used Intel chips and put Intel Inside on their PC's were given funds to use in advertising and were reimbursed for "marketing expenses". In reality these marketing funds were actually a subsidy/discount (some would say kickback) on Intel chips. As Intel's power grew they would only give the PC manufacturers rebates if they would buy 95% of their Microprocessors from Intel. If they used AMD or other microprocessors - all the Intel rebates would disappear. By the end of the 1990s, Intel had spent more than $7 billion on the Intel Inside campaign and had 2,700 PC firms locked up. By 2001 these rebates were running $1.5 billion a year.
Intel was sued in Japan (for offering money to NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony, and Hitachi,) in the EU (for paying German retailers to sell Intel PC's only) and in the U.S. for predatory (pricing), exclusionary behavior, and the abuse of a dominant position (HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway and Hitachi.) The legal record is pretty clear that Intel used payments, marketing loyalty rebates and threats to persuade computer manufacturers, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP), to limit their use of AMD processors. U.S. antitrust authorities have focused on whether the loyalty rebates used by Intel were a predatory device in violation of the Sherman Act. The European Commission (EC) brought similar charges and imposed a 1.06 billion Euros fine on Intel for abuse of a dominant position.
The sum of these efforts not only killed competitors but it killed innovation in microprocessor design outside of Intel for decades.
Ironically Intel's lack of innovation in the 21st century is a direct result of its 20th century policy of being a monopolist.
Good rebels versus Bad Rebels at work here http://steveblank.com/2015/08/25/why-corporate-entrepreneurs...
Agreed, I left a _lot_ of interesting stuff out for the sake of a narrative that could fit into an hour. Reading through the bibliography covers much of what I left on the floor.
really? I'd love to meet them.
There wasn't much evidence that he understood it.
Hmm. Was this written in 1999? Or perhaps the notion of the Lean Startup is not understood in London?
Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist.
Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.
What's missing?
some old tracking codes I embedded 4 years ago from some defunct analytics system I can't remember.
Good thinking, but in this case no. The high value crops they were going after were almond orchards and the specific data they wanted from the trees were only visible from overhead.
Updated http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/ to include link to this page and most of these tools
thx. fixed and updated the tools page with Docracy.
I'm trying to stop the needless and constant bad advice of "lets churn through every possible feature without understanding the entire business model." Doing so is a crutch. Tell me you understand your entire business model and that you thought through the rest of the canvas. Then start iterating the product.
A startup think through all the business model will run rings around those who simply think it's about features.
correct
For clarity.
I was in Mensa ~1969-1982.
In high school I was a terrible student and therefore I didn’t think I was that smart. My sister, much older and much wiser, thought otherwise and had me take a Mensa test when I was a junior.
The numbers confirmed her suspicion.
Being a Mensa member didn’t make school any easier but it gave me comfort that I wasn’t a complete idiot, just that I learned differently. Convergent was the only time I put Mensa on a resume because of how the recruiter described the intellectual horsepower of the hiring exec and the rest of the team. I thought I needed something to wave to get in the door.
It worked. After that I just let my resume and accomplishments speak for themselves.
Hmm. Selection bias perhaps? How many medical devices, nano materials, chemical sensors and life science, etc. startups applied to the last Y-Combinator cohort? The hundreds of hard science teams I see every year don't send you applications.
Not sure if I'm smart enough to figure out how to make teams work virtually for 1,000's of thousands of students at a time. (Can't figure out how to grade progress on this scale.)
I'm leaning to have the class teach individual entrepreneurs the basics of how to build a startup using the business model canvas, customer development and agile engineering.
Think of it as a step-by-step guide to building a startup. An advanced version of the Four Steps to the Epiphany updated for web/mobile/cloud, etc.
Thoughts?
I'd take Chuck Eesley's class first. The Lean LaunchPad class is a methodology driven version of the 2012 update to the Four Steps to the Epiphany.