While this story is about my experience in packaging for computer retail channels, if you substitute the word “web site” for retail, you’ll get the idea why these lessons were timeless for me. 74HGZA3MZ6SV SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, [...]
Filed under: Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 7 Comments »
I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” which defined Vietnam for my generation. (Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.) Campbell describes how he tried to instill in [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. —————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers, Tina Selig and [...]
Filed under: Air Force, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Electonic Warfare, Fred Terman, Signals Intelligence, Steve Blank, World War II | 17 Comments »
At SuperMac, I thought I was good VP of marketing; aggressive, relentless and would take no prisoners – even with my peers inside the company. But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, SuperMac | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 7 Comments »
I was visiting a friend whose company teaches executives how to communicate effectively. 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, Technology | Tagged: Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 13 Comments »
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. – 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. And throughout my career as an entrepreneur I kept asking questions of my VC investors and friends; Where did entrepreneurship [...]
Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Cold War, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 12 Comments »
A year after we started repositioning the company, Engineering, which had been working on a family of new products literally for years, came to deliver some good news and bad news. 74HGZA3MZ6SV First the bad news: the new family of eight high performance graphics cards we were counting on couldn’t be delivered. The plug-in co-processor [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 10 Comments »
This article in the NY Times about China’s thinking strategically about electric cars was a poignant contrast to our struggles in the U.S. with the auto bailout. It reminded me about the adage, “when you’re up to your neck in alligators, the last thing you remember is that you were supposed to drain the swamp.” Memo to Washington – [...]
Filed under: Conservation | Tagged: Steve Blank | 14 Comments »
This is Part IV of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. Read Part III first and it will make a bit more sense. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978. Here I was, a very junior employee of ESL, a company with its hands in the [...]
Filed under: ESL, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Bill Perry, Cold War, ESL, Signals Intelligence, Steve Blank | 5 Comments »
”If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti I was catching up over breakfast with a friend who’s now CEO of his own startup. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Each [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank | 19 Comments »
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? At the same time we were educating the press, we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, SuperMac | 10 Comments »
I saw an article in the New York Times about Google’s hiring practices that reminded me of the differences between great big successful technology companies and small scrappy startups. I love Google.I think its one of the smartest companies out there. And it hires very smart people from the best schools. And if you meet their criteria of [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 26 Comments »
This is Part III of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. 1978. 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. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company [...]
Filed under: ESL, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Bill Perry, Cold War, ESL, Signals Intelligence, Steve Blank | 15 Comments »
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. While the story about the Potereo benchmarks was about relentless execution, its glib description of designing the benchmarks could be read as we cheated. Given we consciously worked hard not [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Startups, Steve Blank | 7 Comments »
A few months into my tenure as the VP of Marketing, we now understood who our customers were. We had thought really hard about “market type” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 8 Comments »
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