Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

(Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). Eric, love the blog.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. Beware the new hire who has "extensive experience" in startups or big companies - using a different growth driver. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Most of these rhyme with what we’ve said in the past, but some have also evolved to fit the changing landscape and our own convictions about what really matters for founders and their investors at the seed stage. Belief #1: The best time to invest is early. And by early, we mean pre-traction.

North America 36

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 36

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

So if entrepreneurs want to pioneer new ideas with a lean model, my advice is to use low cost alternatives to build differentiality that can be protected from institutions with far more money than ethics, creativity, or innovation-- other than skirting the loopholes in our justice system regarding protection of IP, and honing predatory tactics.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. “Everybody felt the burden of supporting all those transactions every day,&# says Pascal-Louis Perez, kaChing’s CTO. “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&#

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 142

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. A few days later Gordon became a founder.

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 1, 2014

So today I’m excited to announce that Upfront Ventures is leading an $8 million round with some amazing co-investors including Founder’s Fund, OATV, Lowercase, High Peaks, Collaborative Fund and many great angel investors. And for the next several months the founders literally ran the business. I’m long NY.

Technical Review 380

Technical Review Software Review Cofounder CTO Hire 380

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Today, when I talk to startup founders, the most common answer I get to the question "do you talk to your customers?" ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Hearpreneur

JUNE 21, 2017

My Mama, the founder of Yuca’s Hut in Los Feliz, CA, didn’t allow a lack of college degrees or a business plan to deter her from launching her dream. Larry Page, Google co-founder.I 8 – You cant change the world working part time. You can’t change the world working part time.

Entrepreneur 52

Entrepreneur Africa Cofounder CTO Hire 52

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Developer Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right. So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. I had heard that all great companies built their applications on Oracle. We had just heard about Oracles support for Linux, so we installed Red Hat and tried to install Oracle.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. It was actually my co-founder Will Harvey who taught me to present this data in the simple format weve discussed in this post. Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Too often, startup founders talk about how they are pushing to get to “critical mass&# and how “economies of scale&# are going to kick in. I’ve been in the software industry for a long time. That’s all fine and dandy. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 76

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Joel is focused on the fact that in many environments, programmers are considered "just the hired help" akin to manual labor, and not treated properly. But increasingly we can move to a world where teams are chartered to accomplish results instead of tasked with creating work on spec. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? incubators, e.g., the many options in New York. intrapreneurs, e.g., the employee of GE who is tasked with launching a new business. incubators, e.g., the many options in New York. What are the terms of their relationship with the founder?

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

I gave him the same advice I give nearly all over-worked, control-freak, do-everything-yourself startup founders: “Your number one priority isn’t any of these things. Your highest priority right now is hiring the 1 or 2 people that are going to join your company and make a difference. It’s awesome.

Seattle 317

Seattle Silicon Valley Technical Review Los Angeles 317

www.aaronkharris.com

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

Im a private tutor on Tutorspree Text Aug 23, 2010 @ 9:08 pm Permalink We have a CTO, and so can you! I was told that finding a CTO/technical co-founder in NYC was about as easy as climbing Everest with one leg, no O2, and carrying a dead elephant. If you want to get in touch, drop me a line at akharris at gmail dot com.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire New York City .Net Cofounder 40

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

While ERC-20 is designed for tracking the balances of one type of fungible tokens, ERC-1155 allows a single contract to track the balance of a very large number of types of tokens, fungible or non-fungible [a fungible token is something that is mutually interchangeable with another identical item. A $20 bill for example. Tell us about it.

CTO Hire 76

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Architecture 76

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

After a thorough analysis of those 32 start-up post-mortems, we have determined the common reasons founders gave to compile this list of the top 20 ways to have your startup fail. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met in New York meetups and events that fit this description. 16 – Get outcompeted.

Cofounder 89

Cofounder Startup Technical Cofounder CTO Hire 89

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

And how do you pick a new direction? Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team. As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

We eventually discovered (via five whys ) that we also had to get each new employee acculturated to a fearless way of thinking. For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day.

Continuous Deployment 131

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 16, 2016

One of the most obvious to me was Nanit, that was brought to our firm by my colleague Jordan Hudson who met them team, fell in love with their founders & technology, and encouraged us to invest. His co-founder and COO, Andy Berman , made the smart move from being a young VC to becoming an entrepreneur.

Jordan 150

Jordan CTO Hire Cofounder 150

www.quora.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Type to Add and Search Questions; Search Topics and People Startups Startup Compensation Entrepreneurship Compensation Stock Options Major Internet Companies Silicon Valley Why is there such a large founder to early employee equity drop-off? The real question here is: why is it fair for founders to get so much more?

Equity 40

Equity Employee Founder Cofounder 40

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Take a look and let me know what you think.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164