While on vacation I had a phone interview with Kevin Ohannessian of Fast Company who wanted a few “funding stories.” Here are two of them. Apologies for the rambling stream of consciousness. The original interview in Fast Company can be seen here. Throw in the Photo and You Have a Deal When we were trying [...]
Filed under: E.piphany, Venture Capital | 12 Comments »
In a startup the search for a business model is chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. In addition it explicitly calls for synchronization and confirmation of the steps by the entire team. Surely a checklist [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, E.piphany | 11 Comments »
In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. But finding what those “minimum” features are can be an adventure. All the Data and Not a Drop to Think We started Epiphany to solve the “too much data but [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, E.piphany | 7 Comments »
Startups need to have a great lawyer, accountant, patent attorney, etc. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers I was having coffee with a friend who teaches at the U.C. Berkeley Boalt Law School and runs their entrepreneurship program. Our conversation led [...]
Filed under: E.piphany | 28 Comments »
At times VC’s forget who their business is built on. Nice Car Last week in a car showroom of all places I ran into a VC who I hadn’t seen in ten years. He had sat on the board of my last company and we chatted and made small talk as he was admiring a [...]
Filed under: E.piphany | 43 Comments »
Sometimes what sounds like bad news when talking to customers might be your finest hour. Hypothesis Testing As we started E.piphany, we got out of the building to test our hypotheses by talking to potential customers in and around Silicon Valley. On one of our most memorable visits, we met with Joe DiNucci, the VP [...]
Filed under: E.piphany | 10 Comments »
In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. As a reminder, this post is not legal advice, it’s not even advice. It’s just a story about what happened to me. Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my [...]
Filed under: E.piphany | 26 Comments »
After my eighth and likely final startup, E.piphany, sitting in a ski cabin, it became clear that there is a better a way to manage startups. Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup. All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, E.piphany, Venture Capital | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, Venture Capital | 14 Comments »
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