Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, March 25, 2010 Speed up or slow down? for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. Everyone was in the flow; the team was hyper-productive.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. Especially for a startup, not taking maximum advantage of free software is crazy.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. Each specialist takes up his part of the spec (UI, middleware, backend) and cranks out code. Nice write-up.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, December 7, 2008 The hackers lament One of the thrilling parts of working and writing in Silicon Valley is the incredible variety of people Ive had the chance to meet. Hes just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our code pushes take another six minutes. Since these two steps are pipelined that means at peak we’re pushing a new revision of the code to the website every nine minutes. On average we deploy new code fifty times a day. Code reviews and pairing Great practices. Throwing out a lot of code.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

femgineer.com

JULY 18, 2010

We engineers know that need to be agile in a startup and be able to scrap code and rebuild, but want we don’t want is to have a founder who manic or aimless. So before you ask someone to even spend an hour of their time writing code or reviewing specs make sure you can pay them in some form (coffee, dinner, laptop, etc.),

Engineer 41

Engineer Software Review Startup Technical Review 41

bizthoughts.mikelee.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Active software engineers probably get two offers a month or more. I was able to hire phenomenal software engineers and grow a strong team culture. Learn to write code yourself. Then go to hacker events and developer meetups. I was lucky enough to have worked for Yahoo! YHOO ) in its second act.

Technical Cofounder 40

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 40

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 6, 2008 Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile I thought Id share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view. Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. When a developer wants to check-in code, this is a very scary moment.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. In particular, try these three things: Invest in technical debts that may never come due.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System. My experience is in Enterprise Software - where we are forced to chunk features into formal releases.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. September 15, 2008 9:12 PM Hitchens said.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

Since then, PHP (as part of the LAMP stack ) has really been the dominant development platform, at least in the free software and startup worlds. When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. Every change required a server restart.

PHP 166

PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

Instead of that naive approach, I wish Id had a book like this one, to help me figure out how to get started with customer development step-by-step. While the customer development framework of Four Steps is universally relevant, The Entrepreneur’s Guide updates its practices for modern startups.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Getting features and fixes into hands of users was the greatest priority - a test environment would just get in the way and slow down the validation coming from having code running in production. When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, May 31, 2010 Thank you The past month has been an incredible roller coaster: #sllconf was a trending topic (briefly topping Justin Bieber before the wifi in the hotel gave out), the Web 2.0 And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. And then you can buy a t-shirt.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 27, 2010 Good enough never is (or is it?) One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, June 17, 2010 No departments Big companies have departments. I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. Startups are companies.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding? We also learned that law is code , and that leadership was needed to build thriving communities in a digital age. Can I send you a review copy?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, September 18, 2008 How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone I have had the opportunity to meet a lot of iPhone-related companies lately. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. I cant really tell.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Even a great architecture becomes inflexible.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 3, 2009

Take a failed product launch. At IMVU , these were quite common (after all, were shipping code 50 times a day). They are collected and reviewed after an appropriate interval (e.g. With due respect to the author’s obvious smarts, these ideas are too logical to be new. This policy doesnt leave much room for excuses.

Employee 146

Employee San Francisco Lean Software Review 146

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. But I think its more productive to think of this as a spectrum.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. I have detected a secret virus in your CPU. The curse of prevention Beware!

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

I believe it is a full, company-wide turn through the OODA loop (for a software business, see especially Ideas-Code-Learn ). You need a process for systematically reviewing your costs and eliminating those that slow you down. Customer Development Engineering : techniques for accelerating your product development.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. This shift allowed us to crank out working software quickly as a service. It was a disaster.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. More recently it's skewed to software & web. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what. April 23, 2010 in San Francisco. Bring your questions.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

betashop.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “ 57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.”. I firmly believe that in this age where the product development life-cycle is so short and user feedback comes so quickly, you will know within a year whether you are focusing on a worthwhile one thing. It’s that important.

Technical Review 108

Technical Review Technology Software Review Valuation 108

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. For example, the best book reviewers only review books published by the best publishers, which only accept manuscripts from the best agents. And how could they possibly review a blog? Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, October 11, 2008 Three decisions to make on virtual goods I was invited to the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday, and got to see quite a few interesting speakers and panels. It got me thinking about what decisions are essential when building a virtual goods product. Heres what I mean. Hi, great post!

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

They aren’t really engaged in customer development, they aren’t getting inside their customers’ heads, and they aren’t crafting a robust ecosystem. For a consumer internet company in particular, this is often due to a lack of design thinking. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156