article thumbnail

Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. Some of the other founders had sold minicomputers to scientists and engineers, but no one knew or understood the unique class of applications and customers of supercomputers. to move their applications to our unique machine architecture.

article thumbnail

Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

We basically had a retainer with one of the pioneering folks in computational chemistry, who ported and tuned his company’s application for our rather radical architecture, and also acted as a marketeer for us in that (then quite nascent) field. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Engineer 207
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

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. How would that change my company strategy? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Vertical 148
article thumbnail

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

Steve Blank

He complemented their elegantly designed minicomputers and made some astute comment about their architecture (now I’m rolling my eyes, their computers were dinosaurs) and asked who were the brilliant designers. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. Thats more than just drawing architecture diagrams, though.

CTO 168
article thumbnail

SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

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. It was fun watching it happen. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Video 170
article thumbnail

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.”