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.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe. We knew something our CEO didn’t.

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Scalable Startup

AUGUST 18, 2013

Then last year I decided to re-educate myself in software development, but this time as a regular ol’ coder. Although I have an EE and CS education, my best contribution to technology businesses has been in strategy/sales/marketing/leadership. Big boy applications. Drupal is prevalent in the Silicon Valley ecosystem?

Software Developers 22

Software Developers Software Development PHP Silicon Valley 22

Scalable Startup

MAY 29, 2012

Here are some of the factors: (1) Amazing Engineering Skills – Let’s just start with the big one. There is a highly under-known fact in the software engineering world – many of the best developers and architects are not in Silicon Valley, but in the New York metro area. These people abound in New York.

Silicon Valley 22

Silicon Valley New York Startup Software Engineering 22

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. I might have pursued a humanities education at a “ kumbaya college ” in California, but it’s only human to be at least a little bit selfish!

Management 85

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. 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. Are you out of your !? *x!

Customer Development 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.” And he was smiling.

Silicon Valley 283

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