This is post II of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. 1974. The Vietnam war was winding down. After been stationed at three fighter bases in Thailand (Ubon, Udorn and Korat) and working on Electronic Warfare suites on F-4’s, A-7’s, F-105’s and AC-130’s, I got orders to report to a [...]
Filed under: Air Force, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Steve Blank | 10 Comments »
With insight into our customers, the first part of our strategy was to understand what kind of positioning problem we had. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market? No, not really. Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 20 Comments »
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” CIA? “Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America? And you’d like me [...]
Filed under: Air Force, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Steve Blank | 14 Comments »
I am going to post on Mondays and Thursdays – at least until I run out of war stories. Posts are going to be a mix of topics: entrepreneurship, secret history and conservation. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week. BTW, keep the comments coming, they’re read and appreciated.
Filed under: Conservation, Customer Development, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Steve Blank | 3 Comments »
After my first month we knew a lot, we knew more about our customers than anyone in the company. In this one month we had learned more about desktop publishing on the Mac than any one of our competitors. Now the question was what to do with it. First I need to make sure what [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 11 Comments »
A week before I started I got inkling of really how deep I was in. While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement. She [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation | 6 Comments »
After leaving Ardent (a supercomputer company I’ll blog about later) in 1988, I consulted for Pixar when they were still in San Rafael and were a hardware company trying to make software and commercials. While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products [...]
Filed under: SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank, Early Stage Startup | Leave a Comment »
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