Remove Advisory Board Remove CTO Hire Remove Customer Development Remove Engineer
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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

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. The VP of Sales and I flew to Providence to convince Andy van Dam at Brown to join our company, or at a minimum lead our advisory board.

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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. My first time at your blog.

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How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Establish a customer advisory board.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. IMVU had a roughly two-month-long development cycle. Each cycle was punctuated by a meeting of our Business Advisory Board (BAB). As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Context matters.