Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

Today I want to go into territory less obvious because let’s face it, hiring the best people and creating conditions where they can succeed is the kind of startup advice that is squarely in the “stating the obvious” category. Lastly, a foundational skill of great product managers is GSD.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Bring in an expert CEO with outstanding business credentials and startup experience to focus on relentless execution. Build a truly mainstream product. Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Focus on quality. We can skip the chasm.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. So far, this is just a summary of what all of us who have attempted to build web-scale architectures considers obvious. But startups rarely have either luxury.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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. Why do they harbor that paranoia?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. After all, our startup is on a fixed budget.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Can this methodology be used for startups that are not exclusively about software?

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. By far the most important thing you want to hire for in a startup is the ability to handle the unexpected.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for T he Lean Startup Conference. We’ve posted the full program for The Lean Startup Conference , and it includes more than three days of events for Gold pass holders and six days of events for VIP pass holders. On the evening of December 8, Ignite Lean Startup kicks off the conference.

Continuous Deployment 162

Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Wed never heard of five whys, and we had plenty of "agile skeptics" on the team. It seems your cluster architecture is one of the key architectural constraints making continuous deployment possible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May. .

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. Those who have the endurance are the ones that tend to lead teams and join startups, because you just cant be successful in a startup situation without empathy. Just change it. What a waste.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

femgineer.com

JULY 18, 2010

HOME About the Femgineer Speaking Engagements Reading List Recruiting Startup Engineers With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers. You won’t find us going out to the normal startup networking events or partying all night. Sweat equity or salary?

Engineer 41

Engineer Software Review Startup Technical Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Startups are companies. Startups aspire to become big companies. Therefore, startups should have departments. Each of these benefits also exists in startups, which is why most startups are also organized in departments. I once worked at a startup with an exceptional functional department system.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins: The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight. The economics of these process trade-offs are discussed in the Principles of Product Development Flow.)

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Its an essential discipline of good software development, especially in startups. Nonetheless, I want to talk about a dysfunction Ive seen in several startups: they are literally refactoring themselves to death. They have a product that has a moderate number of customers. Heres a company I met with recently.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. In a successful startup, the development team is also growing.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 8, 2009 What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? Beyond just those who will be hearing about the lean startup for the first time, Im expecting to shake a lot of hands and have a lot of interesting side conversations. And what hurdles could be eliminated?

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. That startup didnt turn out so well, but not for lack of technology. I cant really imagine how much it cost our "grownup" counterparts at other dot-com startups to get their first app up and running. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

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. Glad you don't > develop software for space shuttles. Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. We’re building the wrong product!” And the rule was we weren’t changing anything about the product architecture until Ben and I agreed.

Founder 317

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 317

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

This is a great example of lean startup thinking. This is one of the most powerful aspects of web architecture, and it often gets lost in other client-server programming paradigms. As you suggest, Thought Experiment Part II is going to involve lots of changes to the classic MMO architecture that makes it more like the web.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68