Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. 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.

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

The Next Web

AUGUST 12, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Christian Reber, CEO and co-founder of Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder. I think an issue many talented entrepreneurs and European founders (especially German founders) have is, they don’t think big enough. Find the right co-founders and advisors.

Cofounder 119

Cofounder CTO Hire Startup Europe 119

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. If outward facing, they will attend important sales calls and speak to the technology strategy and vision. I have also included quotes from Austin CTOs to give you additional perspective.

Fractional CTO 54

Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

The Next Web

DECEMBER 12, 2013

Many of the newer service marketplaces feel more like “movements” rather than “businesses,” and actually require very careful architecture of the end-to-end experience both online and offline, including areas such as culture and workflow. In the early days of e-commerce, sales were typically the most important metric for success.

Mobile 136

Mobile Silicon Valley Viral Technical Review 136

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 17, 2014

by Alex Miller, Co-founder of PosiRank . Marketers hope to disseminate information and inspire sales. Otherwise, a number of internal processes results in lower sales and poorer engagement. Link Architecture. Using automation for link architecture improves search engine optimization and click-through rates.

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Architecture Marketing SEO Cofounder 180

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

I studied architecture before attending Tsinghua University where I studied design. The mission of Ling Technology’s founders was to create a “Ling” world with man and robot symbiosis. The company is striving to build brand awareness internationally and increase sales. Tell us your story. Why did you start your business?

Artificial Inteligence 56

Artificial Inteligence China Technical Review Cofounder 56

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 21, 2017

It could be studying entrepreneurship in school or it could have been working with a government contractor or maybe someone had a sales job. 1 – Medical Device Sales. As a sales representative I noticed that the promotional efforts for Plastic Surgeons were held by a few large firms that overcharged. Sales Account Manager.

Entrepreneur 48

Entrepreneur Investment Bankers PR Social Media 48

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 19, 2009

After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company. Another called Parker Harris, the co-founder and CTO. Web service architecture that provides a content management platform for the Internet. My blog was wiped out. Folksonomy.

Venture Capital 274

Venture Capital Term Sheet San Diego Viral 274

ConversionXL

MARCH 19, 2020

Although the company created an incentive plan to boost sales, its sales growth fell from 19% before the recession to 8% after—five percentage points below Staples’ postrecession sales growth rate. Bain offers a rubric based on your current market position and financial strength: ( Image source ). Learn from forced efficiency.

Marketing 121

Marketing Campaign Non-Compete Lean 121

Ben's Blog

MARCH 1, 2011

Some firms hire pure investors, some firms hire operators, some Wall Street analysts, some firms hire sales people, some firms hire lawyers, and others hire reporters. Two aspects of the original vision that deeply depend on the kind of general partners that we hire are: We will help develop founders into CEOs. A Little Help.

Partner 78

Partner Technical Review Venture Capital Cofounder 78

blog.chrisomeara.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

They tend to have the knack for architecture. The answer to that question is contextual, based on what you, as CEO, and your board believe your "Founder Developer Gap" (reference to the Tony Karrer blog entry ) to be. Their primary characteristics are deep technical skills and a hacker mentality ( about the word hacker ).

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Startup Cofounder 40

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2012

Steve, the VP of Sales and Marketing previously ran their engineering department. Most of the sales force were previously design engineers. but I’ll never forget the interview with Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Sales and Marketing. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Finally I got to sit down.

Silicon Valley 317

Silicon Valley Michigan IP Architecture 317

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. (Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.)

Engineer 205

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 205

venturehacks.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

SUPPORTED BY Products Archives @venturehacks Books AngelList About RSS How to pick a co-founder by Naval Ravikant on November 12th, 2009 Update : Also see our 40-minute interview on this topic. Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. One founder companies can work, against the odds (hello, Mark Zuckerberg).

Cofounder 101

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Technical Review 101

The Startup Magazine

MAY 31, 2017

In collaboration with Itasca Bank’s Woman Initiative, the morning workshop addressed important issues like profit mastery, building a sales organization, process improvement and confidence in contract negotiation. The National Women Business Council states that 99 perfect of woman-owned businesses do not have sales outside the U.S.

Founder 94

Founder Memphis Chicago Alaska 94

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Additionally, he is the co-founder of ConnectYard , a social analytics platform for e-learning platforms. Do we hire 50 sales people?

Cofounder 120

Cofounder DC Entrepreneur Silicon Valley 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. That’s what Just-in-time Scalability is all about.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2023

While it seemed like a good idea and had the Navy’s backing, the founders got turned down for funding by companies, investment bankers and everyone, until they talked to John Parker. Sales in their first fiscal year were $1.5 ERA asked the NSA for permission to offer the computer for commercial sale. Why Minneapolis/St.

Minnesota 288

Minnesota Engineer Minneapolis Silicon Valley 288

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

During the 1990’s large corporations had bought different software applications to automate each part of their enterprise – finance, customer support, manufacturing, sales, etc. The finance system didn’t talk to the sales system which didn’t know the manufacturing system even existed. Founder Too.

San Francisco 229

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 229

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Excepting for cosmically co-incidental success stories, the fuzzy requirement stuff never congeals as a holistic engineering exercise. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority. But the results were excellent - customer satisfaction, sales, profits, quality, attitudes all improved dramatically.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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. There was nothing for the consumer to do. It worked great on the slow CPUs at the time.

Video 168

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 168

thebarefootvc

DECEMBER 16, 2011

Kiva co-founder Jessica Jackley’s latest venture Profounder is one platform that could power these transactions. To watch in 2012: a crowdfunding bill in Congress about to be passed that would allow entrepreneurs to raise up to $1m annually from unaccredited investors in return for ownership stakes in their businesses.

Technical Review 110

Technical Review India Mobile Hockey Stick 110

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

But you don't have any lords and masters to answer to and the pay out goes entirely to the founders and management team. He is currently Co-Founder of CapitalMarkets.com and Editor Of SaaSInsights. In a consumer Web venture, the hustler/sales guy is non-core (a few biz dev deals are important but not core).

Software 127

Software Startup Architecture Bootstrapping 127

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2019

This includes co-founders, management, team member, board members, investors, clients, etc. Finally, our primary financial goal is to triple sales this year vs. last. If we were to go start something new today, we would probably focus on this new breed of real-time, intelligent applications we are calling “co-pilots.”

Open Source 48

Open Source Startup Caching Database 48

readwrite.com

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

And nobody is loving this more than Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Box, which sells cloud-based data storage and collaboration software to enterprises. He says revenue growth is tracking with head-count growth, meaning sales are up roughly 100% year over year. A New Cloud Architecture Emerges.

Silicon Valley 64

Silicon Valley Architecture San Francisco Cloud 64

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. In the end, I believe they co-created our product with us. Open APIs and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0").

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” Or it’s fatal because that was a co-founder. Marketing isn’t scheduling a launch and recruiting isn’t timing the start-dates of the next 50 hires in customer service and sales.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

Cracking the Code

FEBRUARY 12, 2007

Bessemer was also heavily represented with David Cowan , managing partner and co-founder of VeriSign ( see his post about the event ), Rob Stavis , BVP’s New York-based managing partner who led our investment in Skype, Byron Deeter , partner and founder of Trigo and our COO/managing partner Ed Colloton. on a scale of 1-4).

Software Review 48

Software Review SEM Marketing Las Vegas 48

Up and Running

DECEMBER 16, 2014

For this webinar, we were joined by Jennefer Witter, CEO and founder of the Boreland Group, and author of the new book, “The Little Book of Big PR: 100+ Quick Tips to Get Your Small Business Noticed.” As a result, we don’t put him in any of the architecture books. It really should be where your audience is reading.

Public Relations 117

Public Relations Small Business PR Entrepreneur 117

Lightspeed Venture Partners

APRIL 19, 2016

The Cloud has simplified and accelerated time to development, Big Data has made applications smarter and more predictive, and Microservices are changing the way we think about our application architecture. Needless to say, it’s a fun time to be a software developer. But, as with every revolution, new problems emerge.

Architecture 60

Architecture Cofounder Cloud Distribution 60

blog.startupsquare.com

APRIL 13, 2010

I would group “Customer segment&# , “Business architecture&# , and “Platform pivot &# under this. In the case of option (2), it’s time to find a co-founder to bounce ideas off of. Im a co-founder of startupSQUARE.com and am strongly committed to the customer development process.

Lean 40

Lean Startup Cofounder Architecture 40

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 3, 2012

Technical founders Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin built the original prototype at their lab at MIT starting in late 1996 before raising capital, so in a sense Akamai’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was a prototype with the basic architecture and traffic mapping in place that validated algorithms for the founders and investors alike.

Distribution 49

Distribution Lean Massachusetts Cofounder 49

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 12, 2018

By utilizing the play on words, I’ve created a name that conveys quality research and final content that is geared towards firearms, but isn’t so on-the-nose that it comes off as unusual if I occasionally create historic content related to a different field – say, architecture or archaeology. Photo Credit: Andy Halliday.

Naming 78

Naming Suriname Entrepreneur Sweden 78

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Non-Technical Co-Founders Co-Founders Technical Co-founders Finding Co-Founders Startups & "How Important Are Ideas?" " Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

The Next Web

JULY 8, 2013

I recently stumbled upon this great read by Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, and number 10 caught my eye: “ Growth solves (nearly) all problems.”. The set of skills required from founders change and we have to adopt quickly. Currently we are based in Israel and we are making steps in establishing our US based HQ.

Advisory Board 128

Advisory Board API Cofounder PPC 128