Steve Blank and the The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Since I arrived to California I have been keeping a personal blog to update friends and family about my experience in this land of dreams and opportunity. Approximately one year ago I briefly posted about The Secret History of Silicon Valley, a presentation I bumped into by chance surfing the Internet. The author happened to be a UC Berkeley professor. Not much more to it at that moment, it was interesting to know what is behind the visible history of "The Valley"...

This semester I enrolled in Customer and Business Development, a course taught by Steve Blank, by the way one of my favorite classes at Haas. Some days ago he mentioned "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" and I realized how "unconnections" are playing around us all the time, we just have to pay attention.

I mentioned Steve's book, the Four Steps to the Epiphany, in my post on the Design process. I really recommend if you plan to start a business, if you are running one or if you started one and, as Steve likes to put it, left a crater behind and you are curious about what went wrong.

...draftish and could use some design too, but useful as can be...

The book's main thesis is that a start-up is not the small-size version or a regular firm. Applying the traditional cookie-cut product development approach in a start-up is the recipe for disaster. Entrepreneurs must identify what kind of market are they in (new, existing, re-segmented), get to know their customers and learn how to scale up sales before switching on the cash-burning machine. This methodology has interesting contact points with the design thinking methodology (user observation, fail often and fail cheap in order to learn quickly...). It provides a great framework with actionable milestones to help you launch a business.

Check out Steve's blog, some posts tend to be too long for those with MBA / Harvard cases induced attention deficit disorder but they are well worth it...