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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."

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Second Startups: Why Founders Often Struggle to Find Their Second Act

View from Seed

The reasons are fairly obvious: It’s easy to reference them and understand their track record; they’ve made a ton of mistakes already that they have hopefully learned from and are unlikely to make again; they are probably more adept at raising and managing capital, which reduces financing risk down the road, etc. 2: Fleeing from the familiar.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. 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.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

Yet there’s a lot of mystery around pivots, and entrepreneurs ask all the time how you know it’s time to commit to a new direction. To shed some light, I talked with kaChing , a destination that enables individual investors to find outstanding money managers to manage their money.

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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) By the time the entrepreneurial bug hit me, the dot-com boom was in its waning days. So much for timing. But I managed a few "good learning experiences" before throwing myself full-bore into IMVU.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown, and the key to success is building an integrated team that includes product development in the feedback loop with customers. 2008 09 06 Eric Ries Haas Columbia Customer Development Engineering View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.