Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Stanford: Steve Blank Serial Entrepreneur 10-01-2008

I really enjoyed hearing his thoughts on startups. It is really interesting
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2064
Entrepreneurial Though Leader Lecture

  • there is a lot of tools to manage product risk. Not tools for customer market risks.
  • Assessing Customer and Market Risks
  • founders always need to interact with the customers
    • Everyone in the team, marketing, etc. needs to be run in a way where ALL of them interact with customers.
    • if not: You get out of touch. You start to believe the people interacting with the customers are "wrong" "not working hard enough" "not good enough".
    • Customer interaction is sobering, and keeps you on track.
  • How do you figure out if the problems you are solving/product/ are correct?
    • Get the hell out of the building and test. No slides, etc.
    • Test the fundamental ideas of the product. Show me there are customers out there that agree this is a big enough problem to use / pay for.
    • 20 min exercise. A week of testing would be very sobering.

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