Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

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. Context here.) I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e. a new type of graphics architecture, or a new communications chip architecture) mean you may not know if the chip performs as well as you thought until you get first silicon.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

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. 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.”

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

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.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. What a great idea. No, not really.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

The plug-in co-processor architecture was too complex and couldn’t be made to work reliably. Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. Instead of eight boards, Engineering was going to be able to deliver one new graphics board.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 134