article thumbnail

Technical Advisors: Every Startup Needs One

TechEmpower

Conclusion Bottom line – if you are an early-stage startup with online or mobile technology as part of your solution, you ABSOLUTELY NEED a technical advisor. After the initial money has mostly been spent, it can be very tough to recover. Having a strategic and tactical advisor can greatly reduce the chance you’ll get stuck.

article thumbnail

Technical Advisors: Every Web/Mobile Startup Must Have One

SoCal CTO

And it made me come to a new realization: Every early-stage web/mobile/online startup should have at least one technical advisor, probably two. Most early-stage, in-house teams needs to be hands on developers, not strategic. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm doing as a Part-Time CTO or Technical Advisor for startups.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

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

article thumbnail

Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

Over my career as a serial entrepreneur I observed that since the late 1990s, no early-stage Silicon Valley investor had used business plans to screen investments. The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today.

article thumbnail

6 Ways OKRs Can Help Your Startup Achieve World Domination

YoungUpstarts

In order to grow, startups need a much more focused, realistic and agile approach to goal setting that builds momentum and establishes a pattern of success. However, this relatively simple principle is game changing for early-stage operations that often focus exclusively on the Big Hairy Audacious Goals of a decade ago.

Agile 100
article thumbnail

A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. While we were going to teach theory and frameworks, these students were going to get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company.

Lean 298
article thumbnail

Lean Innovation Management – Making Corporate Innovation Work

Steve Blank

The first time a few brave corporate innovators tried to overlay the Lean tools and techniques that work in early-stage startups in an existing corporation, the result was chaos, confusion, frustration and ultimately, failure. Fast forward to today. We can adapt these startup tools for use inside the corporation. Lessons Learned.

Lean 120
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? Go on an agile diet quickly. With a product development team that is not shipping, any agile methodology will surface major problems quickly.

Customer 167