2010 Customer Development Part-Time VPE Software 
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 19, 2009
While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 5, 2009
I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” 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. Only then did I realize we both forgot to ask.
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Steve Blank
JUNE 25, 2009
These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. If not, whos going to insist we switch to free and open source software? Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job.
Startup Lessons Learned
DECEMBER 7, 2008
Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Just change it.
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