Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

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

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. Why does it work?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

I understand why people would think that a consumer internet service like IMVU isnt really mission critical. 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.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

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

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

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

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. That is what we started with on the Internet 30 years ago.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

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. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

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

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 22, 2008

Lots of engineers are busy checking in and deploying their work. Someone has managed to convince themselves that they have to do their big architecture change in one fell swoop. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

Product Development 68

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Of course, the real thanks should go to a startup - Gogo Inflight Internet - that I was lucky enough to meet at a recent workshop. I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens.

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment 68

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 68

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

I don’t know any developers. Here’s the rub: in consumer internet (and often enterprise), if your founding team doesn’t have the chops to get a prototype of your product out and in the hands of a blogger to test and write about, you might as well save yourself a lot of pain – you’re not going anywhere. I need money for the servers.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

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

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

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. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

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