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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. Personal supercomputer s meant yet again learning something completely new; new computer architectures, new applications and customers, new markets. to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Now In Print!

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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!

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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. In these markets it’s all about invention risk. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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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. I was surprised to see that they were in the room. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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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.

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Need a Technical Co-founder? Hire a Product Design Lead First

This is going to be BIG.

He thinks about how he can offer solutions, not create more problems like RSS readers did. information architecture - Does the layout, categorizations, data input, etc correspond with the way users think about dealing with this kind of service or content? Good design is winning all over the web--at sites like Mint, Twitter,and Quora.

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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. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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