Sophia Perl of Wisdom

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

Last week, (seems that all of my postings start this way) I attended the Second Annual West Coast Businesswomen’s Sustainability Leadership Summit , a Women’s Network for Sustainable Future event , at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. And to top it all off, she is an engineer. Gotta love that!

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Leadership San Jose Green Harvest 40

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 307

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 307

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda. VP of Sales?

Silicon Valley 200

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 200

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2020

They created a program called Onward California in partnership with the State of California and with the support of governor Newsom. Their model in California was so successful they eventually created a new organization, Onward US, dedicated to putting American workers displaced by COVID-19 back to work. Jake Soberal : Yeah.

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Fresno Community Technology California 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. 2-way search is still in the works but I have the semantic extracted tags (thanks to Zemanta) feeding in to many search engines (activate realtime frankensearch). I was an idiot. What type of feedback do you think I should go after?Obviously

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

00:00:06] DEREK: Tell us about growing up in Northern California, tell us about what your dad did, what your mom did, and your family a little bit. [00:00:52] I grew up in Northern California. They paid engineers $4,000 more entry-point. Engineering vs. non-engineering. [00:10:32] Engineering degree.

Cofounder 337

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Startup San Diego 337

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. Engineers as Salesmen I thought (and still do) that this sales guy walked on water.

Technology 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

Silicon Valley 194

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

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. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn. The magazines got passed around to all the engineers until they were dog-eared and worn. But I was breathing heavy and it felt like I was looking at supercomputer porn.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 167

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

Video 184

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 184

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 283

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 283

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 331

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 331

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team. The primary goal of customer development is to reduce the cost of mistakes.

Venture Capital 239

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 239

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 265

Berkonomics

JUNE 16, 2016

Dave’s note: Our guest author this week is Kevin McDonald, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Alvaka Networks, a network services and security firm in Irvine, California. By Kevin McDonald. The goal is to “phish” a person into taking actions they shouldn’t. So what does phishing look like?

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Software Review Technical Review Security California 48

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 release of the product.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2021

Carbon Health is now running some of the largest vaccination sites in California, most famously at Dodger Stadium, in partnership with the City of Los Angeles. I think one of the things that we, who are, you have the privilege of being here, in America, in California, in Silicon Valley. ER : How would you contrast the difference?

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Silicon Valley Turkey Los Angeles California 60

David Teten

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

By contrast, as a venture capitalist, I can report that almost all of our portfolio companies are desperate to hire talented software engineers, and eager to hire in a range of other roles. A team in California is already creating a offshore seastead for non-US citizens who want to build companies in the US.

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Government Technical Review New York Offshore 146

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. We listed the editors, writers, what they had previously had written, deadlines, what the competitive products were, how our benchmarks stacked up, what “upgrades” our boards needed from engineering to win, etc.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Hard skills such as data analytics are essential to being successful as a product manager, but equally-valued are soft skills such as communication, collaboration and leadership. Use frameworks in interviews to explain your qualifications and show your thought-processes. Can you take vague user problems and turn them into real plans?

Management 85

Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

David Teten

DECEMBER 2, 2019

Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation identifies entrepreneurs that display characteristics of “exceptional social leadership through discretion, influence, vision, ambition, intelligence, and follow-through.”. Columbia Business School Tamer Fund for Social Ventures. Requires Columbia affiliation. J.M.Kaplan Innovation Prize. “The

Technical Review 60

Technical Review SBIR Dilution Silicon Valley 60

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

We four instructors would grumble and complain to one another about our lack of leadership. And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. In reality it would be another 20 years.) I also knew our customers.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

SoCal CTO

MAY 15, 2009

A creator and producer of social media, Michael’s responsibilities include leadership for the design team, concept creation and strategic consulting for highly engaging interactive experiences. He is a former chairman of the Business Software Alliance, and currently is Chair of the LA Chapter of the Technology Council of Southern California.

Social Network 150

Social Network Networking Los Angeles Fractional CTO 150

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 230

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Hunter Walker

JULY 14, 2016

We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership. Michael Stoppelman, SVP, Engineering, Yelp.

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Cofounder Southern California America Artificial Inteligence 48

Hunter Walker

JULY 14, 2016

We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership. Michael Stoppelman, SVP, Engineering, Yelp.

Cofounder 48

Cofounder Southern California America Artificial Inteligence 48

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Four years later Ayer and another Granger engineer would leave Granger and found one of the preeminent electronic warfare and ELINT companies: Applied Technologies. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Government 155

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Look for some “ skunk works &# project where the product developers are actively seeking alternatives to their own engineering organization. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Scalable Startup

AUGUST 18, 2013

The So Cal engineering gap? Drupal has a worldwide engine of real software discipline. Although I have an EE and CS education, my best contribution to technology businesses has been in strategy/sales/marketing/leadership. I’ve been able to study the Southern Cal software dev scene as an insider for over 2 years now.

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Software Developers Software Development PHP Silicon Valley 22

Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

I recruited a top-flight engineer and serial entrepreneur to build our MVP, on equity?—?and And, while working to build the business we want, a competitor in California secured resources to far outpace us. in a huge $77b market. and every other team member the same way. Our Monthly Active Users was 53%?—?(people Of course I do.

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Silicon Valley Startup B2C Sweat Equity 54