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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

Building an Advisory Board In my travels outside the building I kept my eyes out for articulate and visionary scientists and engineers who had expertise we lacked, and were willing to help in an advisory capacity. I chose to hire engineers from within each of our target markets and set up “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.”

Engineer 198
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Techies? Write Your Own Ticket In Southern California

blog.socaltech.com

I’ve covered this topic many times before, but I keep coming back to it, because everytime I turn around I’m talking with both startups and established companies in Southern California who are telling me they are looking for technical talent to join their company. Tags: Jobs Southern California. Why do I say that?

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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. Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.”

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Should Your Engineering Startup Join A Chamber Of Commerce?

YoungUpstarts

When it comes to engineering, much of what you will be doing is design, especially if your niche within the industry is civil engineering. When it comes to designing architecture, for example, this market is largely dependent upon the local economy. Keeping Tabs on the Local Economy.

Engineer 100
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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

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Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e.

Vertical 144
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Someone Stole My Startup Idea – Part 3: The Best Defense is a Good IP Strategy

Steve Blank

The assets you can protect may include your “core technology&# like source code, hardware designs, architectures, processes, formulas. The test for non-obvious is: given the prior art at the time of the invention, would a typical engineer 1) identify the problem, and 2) solve it with the invention? In the U.S.