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Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank

I just had lunch (at my favorite Greek restaurant in Palo Alto forgetting it looked like a VC meetup) with a friend who was technical founder of his company and is now its chairman. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. Filed under: Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. It Seems Logical.

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[Review] The Lean Startup

YoungUpstarts

Enter “ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses “, a New York Times bestseller by founder of IMVU (creator of 3D avatars) Eric Ries. Not doing so would end up in wasteful innovations and features that customers do not want.

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

Steve Blank

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 couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

Yet in our case the product, the machine as delivered from engineering, was a blank, featureless computer with just an operating system and compilers. He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.)

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Customer Development is Not a Focus Group

Steve Blank

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.”

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

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. Sometimes quick and dirty actually incurs less debt.

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SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. But Apple had planned to announce and demo QuickTime without a way to get video into the Mac. It was fun watching it happen. steve MIchael W. ,

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