Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

In a recent Deloitte Review of “ Diversity as an Engine of Innovation ” executives were asked about the connection between diversity and company performance, and 90 percent agreed it was critical. Your startup, for example, will more likely see and understand sooner the needs and wants of a larger and more diverse customer base.

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Advisory Board Silicon Valley Startup United States 228

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

We are purpose-built to not only invest pre-product but also to help accelerate your path to product-market fit with our decades of entrepreneurial and investing experience along with our active CXO advisory board. First check to seed?—?congrats AWS Reinvent Survivor Dinner with founders, Fortune 500 execs, and VCs.

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Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos spent 20+ years in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2015

But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Since Tom was an engineer I explained the “Organizational Debt” metaphor. Does customer communication need to change ? the company had. Is that feasible?

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Salary Early Stage Software Review 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 7, 2019

I saw this challenge outlined well in a new book, “ Learning to Lead ,” by Ron Williams, former CEO of Aetna and self-made business leader, who rose from the poor side of the tracks in south Chicago to lead several large businesses, and ultimately serve on the President’s Management Advisory Board for several years.

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Advisory Board Chicago Database Leadership 227

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

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.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Up and Running

MAY 20, 2014

Since much of the start-up playbook is about learning as much as you can as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to reach some important milestone, many founders, investors, and engineers look at a $200k, two-year program as an inefficient means to an uncertain end.

Entrepreneur 88

Entrepreneur Advisory Board Silicon Valley New York 88

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. If youre interested in being part of my "customer advisory board" for this presentation, please get in touch. I am extending it to all start-ups.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. It seemed like once a week Yuri would come back from a customer meeting brimming with new insights. And that’s where the problem was. he’d declare. “We

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 11, 2022

Running a business is hard But with a good referral program it doesn't have to be As a small business owner you are probably thinking about helping your current customer or trying to figure out how to increase sales. As a business owner myself, I know you just want your customers to be happy with their purchases.

Programming 87

Programming Small Business Advisory Board B2B 87

Hearpreneur

APRIL 12, 2019

It might be the products or the customers they deal with, or it could even be the fact that they are the ones in charge of it all. Before becoming a business owner I used to be a manager at the Boeing company and managed a team of engineers working on the 787 Dreamliner. The reasons are as varied as the businesses themselves.

Entrepreneur 128

Entrepreneur St. Louis Florida Colorado 128

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

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. November 25, 2009 9:54 AM Danny Wong said.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 7, 2013

Thankfully, the availability of other unconventional funding options is also increasing, providing capital to entrepreneurs whose businesses may grow to become long-term customers. Another is Google Ventures, which works with portfolio companies full-time on design, recruiting, marketing, and engineering.

Advisory Board 249

Advisory Board Entrepreneur Portland Oregon 249

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. And once you got the data you asked for, it still took weeks or months for a marketer to tease out any customer insight and trends from the data. An Epiphany.

San Francisco 228

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 228

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. In 1955, the pretense of keeping unclassified and classified work separate imposed too much of an administrative overhead and Stanford merged the Applied Electronics Lab and the Electronics Research Laboratory into the Systems Engineering Lab.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. Unfortunately, we made two critically flawed assumptions: that customers would primarily consume first-party assets that we shipped to them on CD and that they would tend to congregate in a relatively uniform way.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 19, 2018

We enjoy visionary leadership, dedicated engineers working on their life ambitions, exceptional operational leadership, the A list of advisory board members, highly skilled assembly technicians, and energetic marketing and product team members. What is your secret sauce? Our people! The Apptronik Team.

Texas 74

Texas Advisory Board Startup Angel Investor 74

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

You’ll realize you’re ready to exit the Search step when you have customer validation: You’ve found a sales channel that matches how the customer wants to buy and the costs of using that channel are understood. If he already had an advisory board (formal and/or informal), add CEO’s who have been through this phase.

Startup 120

Startup Lean Venture Capital Advisory Board 120

David Teten

JANUARY 23, 2021

The next best move is to build your core team, e.g., recruit an Advisory Board, Venture Partners, and EIRs. For example, one LP told me she prefers customized emails from fund principals, as opposed to a bulk-mailed quarterly update. For ideas, see How Executives Can Work from Home with Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Technical Review Software Review 78

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2009

pbWorks (formerly pbWiki) was one of the first companies that ever invited me to join their advisory board. pbWorks (formerly pbWiki) was one of the first companies that ever invited me to join their advisory board. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Audio San Francisco Video Continuous Deployment 118

Hearpreneur

MARCH 15, 2016

We also have a scientific team, consisting of three chemical engineers in addition to Jan, who is the founder and the inventor. Sometimes a great advisory board can be just as useful. Find a niche market that you can dominate; it gives you revenues and valuable information about customers.

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Advisory Board Michigan SBIR Revenue 48

David Teten

NOVEMBER 17, 2011

It’s very powerful to have a model that you can email to everyone in the firm, because then everyone sees clearly that you’re communicating the exact same message to the whole team (including outside consultants and the advisory board, if any). Financial Model.

Employee 155

Employee IRR Startup Mexico 155

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

There’s more interest on the business school students and engineer students than there’s ever been. What do you do with an advisory board?” Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111 Filed under: Customer Development. I’m seeing it in real time.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York 120

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

When you get started (and you will! ), you will spend most of your time dealing with crises that never end and setting up meetings with current and future investors, customers, suppliers, and distributors. Even a patent can be reverse-engineered in order to copy a process. Valeant is a good example. Thanks to Kenny Kline, BarBend !

Entrepreneur 97

Entrepreneur Advisory Board Green Networking 97

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups avoid getting customer feedback for precisely this reason: they are afraid that if early reactions are negative, theyll be "forced" to abandon their vision. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

thebarefootvc

JUNE 13, 2010

This weekend I was at a family celebration in New Jersey and spent some time with an uncle who is a chemical engineer by training but also well versed in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures. If you don’t have a (large) ear to the ground, you will miss out on your customers’ needs or your competitors’ moves.

Rwanda 79

Rwanda Entrepreneur Advisory Board New Jersey 79

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 20, 2010

I recently did a webinar for the Search Engine Strategies conference (I am doing the opening conference keynote at SES London and SES New York ) and my Market Motive co-faculty member Greg Jarboe sent me this KPI via email: "Your webcast was a big success. How do you measure success of a online webinar? Do your happy dance!

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Analytics Search SEO Metrics 90

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Unfortunately, after months or even years of development, many companies discover that customers arent willing to buy their new wares. Then, the company spends no more than a few hundred dollars marketing the product through search engines and to the contacts in its sales database and LinkedIn.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Pascal's View

APRIL 5, 2016

I recently joined the Advisory Board to Gerhard Blechinger , the Rector of the FachHochschule Salzburg, (the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences) and became a guest lecturer on Entrepreneurship at the University. Let’s not forget that Microsoft had a huge monopoly in operating systems in the 90’s.

Austria 28

Austria Global Silicon Valley Advisory Board 28

The Next Web

JULY 8, 2013

My startup reached product market fit, meaning that customers love our product and we are actually producing value for them. 8 are in R&D, 1 product, 1 customer support, 1 biz dev, 1 marketing and 1 administrative. More customers means more requests: The more customers we get the more requests for features, customization and so on.

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Advisory Board API Cofounder PPC 128

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2019

You can read more about our window technology in the latest issue of Chemical Engineering Progress. We look at how much value a gram of quantum dots will bring to the customer, and how big is that addressable market opportunity. Solar cells like near-infrared light best, and plants prefer yellow/orange/red. Great question.

Technical Review 54

Technical Review Startup Harvest Advisory Board 54

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. How upset will those customers be?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2019

As I’ve helped entrepreneurs find their own product-market fit and connected them to potential clients, investors, and Advisory Board members, I’ve spent a lot of time telling them about the “cool kids”. At Coremetrics, I built more of an engineering-driven culture. it isn’t easy. all in real-time?—?and

Software Review 48

Software Review Sales Cofounder Analytics 48

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 8, 2013

In addition to being startup founders, like Richard Branson , founder of more than 400 companies and still going strong, there are several other key roles that I see Boomers taking more often these days to drive successful startups: Advisory Board. Customer service. Executive Assistant (aka Secretary).

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Advisory Board Angel Investor Startup Equity 247

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts.

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Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

The larger-account division wanted to move the pricing in just the other direction – making the low-end products more expensive, so their large customers would have an increased incentive to upgrade. Many custom reports had been created for this meeting, and the data warehouse team was in the meeting, too.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133