article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

CTO 168
article thumbnail

Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator’s first graduates head to Silicon Valley

The Next Web

The accelerator, which counts Amazon CTO Werner Vogels among its startup mentors , will be showcasing its first batch of startups (see list below) in Silicon Valley on the 20th of September, followed by a panel discussion about “The Future of the European Startup Community” Sounds riveting!

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

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. All three probably make attempts at world-of-mouth marketing - its just that for Viral, its life-or-death. Its simply too hard to focus on more than one.

article thumbnail

Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

article thumbnail

Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

If you havent seen it, Pascals recent presentation on continuous deployment is a must-see; slides are here. “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.&#

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth." Labels: agile , continuous deployment 1 comments: timothyfitz said. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Update: PDF version for "lazy linux users" and others who love freedom.