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. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. 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.)

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Accept that good design sometimes leads to technical debt anyway.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

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. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The artists on the team had called in the big guns, and VP-level folks were there to explain the importance of certain aspects of the visual design that threatened to be cut.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software 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. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

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.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. Today that’s built on the premise that an x86 architecture is the one best suited for big data. But it’s not over for Intel.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Build a truly mainstream product.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

We describe their efforts as “heroic” because all the established procedures and processes in a large company are primarily designed to execute and support the current business model. Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc.

Programming 320

Programming Incubator Leadership Silicon Valley 320

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

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. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id.

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Finding great engineers is hard; figuring out whos good is even harder. For software engineers, I think this absolutely has to be a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. I have found this quite rare in engineers. Many of us engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day. Let me show you what this looked like after a few years of practicing five whys in the operations and engineering teams at IMVU.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. Just change it. Every day counts, every minute counts.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. Product development deals in designs, which are fundamentally intangible.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. And if you actually want to respond to shifting customer behavior by running a new marketing campaign (ads, email, etc.,) All the Data and Not a Drop to Think.

San Francisco 228

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 228

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

I was told they werent sure, because all of their engineers were currently busy refactoring. The engineering team has decided its reached a breaking point, and is taking several weeks to bring it up to modern standards, including unit tests, getting started with continuous integration , and a new MVC architecture.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Switching these customers directly to continuous deployment sounds harder than it really is. A typical "new feature" release is, in my experience, about 80% changes to underlying APIs or architecture. The second shift in mindset required is to separate the concept of a marketing release from the concept of an engineering release.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

You dont need to invent a new architecture, and you dont need to even build your architecture up-front. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Were in a new wave of platform evolution. 1 comments: flixsterwidgettest said. yeah, its awesome.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Keep split-testing, but keep this iron rule: if it doesnt change customer behavior, its not a feature. A second idea is that less is more in product design: A key tenet of the philosophy is that uncluttered products with fewer, better features are preferred to similar products with more features.

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Both sides start to think of their point of view in moralistic terms: “those guys don’t see the economic value of fast action, they only care about their precious architecture diagrams&# or “those guys are sloppy and have no professional pride.&# Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Lets start with a distinction between shipping new software to the customer, and changing the customers experience. The idea is that often you can change the customers experience without shipping them new software at all. Its design goals arent geared towards efficiency in terms of technical costs.

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 17, 2016

She took a break from Stanford in 1990 and 1991, as VP of business development at Protein Design Labs , Inc. We do that as an) incentive for the company to invest the resources (to further develop the technology into a product). … Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Government 120

Government Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Silicon Valley 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Policy makers need to know: regulations designed to manage big-companies actually protect those companies by stifling innovation (and competition) from startups. You can see the design of the program here. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? conference attendees.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

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

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. is it really that the only people who can build great startups are engineers? Engineers don’t always have the best business ideas.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

He , Srikanth Narayan , Ben Werdmuller von Elgg , Jo Vi Ko , Justin Lee , Giovanni Tardini , David de Weerdt , Vineet Thanedar , Ryan Brideau , Jonathan Meiri , Rob Weedn , Krzysztof Kowalczyk , Greg Pilling , Kevin Leland , Parham Michael Ossareh , Dan Loewenherz , Mary Specht , Engin Erdo?an "I am a creative guy with a startup idea."

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42