Architecture Engineer Lean Vertical 
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 19, 2009
Building an Advisory Board In my travels outside the building I kept my eyes out for articulate and visionary scientists and engineers who had expertise we lacked, and were willing to help in an advisory capacity. Context here.) I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product.
Steve Blank
MAY 28, 2009
Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. 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.
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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.
Steve Blank
JUNE 25, 2009
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.) Their engineers hated us. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.
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.
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. Why do they harbor that paranoia?
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 30, 2009
One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. What a great idea. No, not really. Then WHAT it IS?
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