Remove 2010 Remove CTO Hire Remove Customer Development Remove Sales
article thumbnail

Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

article thumbnail

He's Only in Field Service

Steve Blank

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. Some sales guy who was too busy to take the meeting was probably retired in Maui on the commissions. Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot (The following guest post is a new experiment for this blog. “Everybody felt the burden of supporting all those transactions every day,&# says Pascal-Louis Perez, kaChing’s CTO. That all-hands lasted five minutes. says Rachleff.

article thumbnail

Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010

SoCal CTO

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. August 20, 2010 They say people won't pay for content. m the f%*kin’ boss.”. clearly didn’t cause this.” How it happens.

Startup 191
article thumbnail

Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Startup Lessons Learned

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Audience 119
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

article thumbnail

Finding Technical Cofounders Is Hard

rob.by

Tuesday, August 17, 2010. 14 comments: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 dpickett says: Great post, man! I think there tends to be this improper mindset that development resources are a commodity, and that they can’t be found easily…and subsequently, cheaply (or even free). Tuesday, August 17, 2010 e.p.c.