Steve Blank walks through a four-part checklist entrepreneurs use to evaluate any startup: identify the opportunity and what created it, determine if innovation is technology or market-driven, distinguish customers from payers (at Baidu, users aren't the advertisers paying), and map both competitors and complementors who add value.
Chapters
And here's the first big idea, is that when you're doing a startup, there's almost a checklist of things that entrepreneurs mentally worry about for every company. Some of these things VCs will tell you to stick in your business plan, some of these things never get spoken but you end up doing anyway, And some of these things you just kind of forget to do. So I tend to kind of list them as almost a checklist. And they kind of work across startups, whether they're web startups or biotech startups, but they're different as you cross industries. So let me just go through Steve's list of what a checklist is. The first one is, what's the opportunity? Where did the idea come from? And we could expand on this and we will a bit later in this talk, but basically is the idea a technology idea? Is it the fact that the industry has just changed? Is it that there's some government rules and regulations that just enabled this new business? Or is it an existing market and you've decided that you could build something either faster, better, or cheaper? Next thing on my checklist is, where's the innovation? Is it coming out of a technology innovation or is it a market innovation? The customer, who is the customer? When I used to think about customers, I used to think, oh, customer is the person who wrote you the check. But as we'll see when we take a look at the different companies that spoke At this ETL, customers and payers may not be the same. Baidu, who are the customers? Who are Baidu's customers? Anybody know? Advertisers. Who are the people who use the site? Who are they? They're the users. They're the users. Who pays? Advertisers. Advertisers. Ooh, all of a sudden, interesting business model. The users have nothing to do with paying for the site. When you look at different businesses, we'll find out that that's actually more true more often than not. Competition. Who are the competitors and who are the complementors? A complementor could be an adjacent market company that actually can add value to your company.
