Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

VCs and Angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). Chief Brand Officer. Chief Risk Officer.

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Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

VCs and Angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). Chief Brand Officer. Chief Risk Officer.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

VCs and angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). Chief Brand Officer. Chief Risk Officer.

CTO Hire 227

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 14, 2011

We saw lots of examples of the " concierge MVP " technique, where an entrepreneur solves customer problems manually, by hand, before automating the solution. And we saw lots of direct engagement with customers, figuring out what really needs to be done. A few words in a document aren't proof of a new approach.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

“Lean” is great in the early days but if you discover an attractive market opportunity you need to get “fat” really quickly or somebody else will. There are times where your solution should work but it just doesn’t. It might be for technical reasons or it might be for customer adoption reasons.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. So he would allocate say – 20% to sales, 15% to marketing, 20% to eng priorities, 10% to customer support, 10% to ops, 20% to ‘platinum customers’ and maybe 5% directly to me as the CEO.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. But I am confident that many of these ideas still apply.

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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. Eventually, I came to summarize these themes with the phrase " the lean startup." So thats me, your author.

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Hearpreneur

JULY 8, 2017

Todd McGuire is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of startup incentaHEALTH and we had to the opportunity to hear from him about starting business, the future of the company and what entrepreneurship means to him. I am the co-founder and CTO of the digital health care company incentaHEALTH. Hi, I’m Todd.

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crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement – [link]. How to Scale Without Losing Savvy Customer Service – [link]. SaaS CEOs: Measure Customer Engagement – [link]. Zynga Leans On Some Workers to Surrender Pre-IPO Shares – [link]. How to Scale Without Losing Savvy Customer Service – [link].

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing has been very active in the Lean Startup movement. With case studies like this, we aim to illustrate specific Lean Startup techniques through the stories of current practitioners. in fact only five people converted into paying customers. The site has about 700 active paying customers. Which is a nice story.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

The law of large numbers (of customers) says you cant help but make at least some money - your valuation is determined by how well you monetize the tidal wave of growth. Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth.

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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. This is one of the bedrock practices of any lean startup , and so its a common piece of advice I give out.

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The Next Web

OCTOBER 10, 2013

Hire everyone you need as an employee. After being part of a team of five that co-founded a fairly successful company and still have the original team together after half a decade, here’s what I learned about having cofounders. Shoulder – not to cry on, but to lean on. You are the founder, the visionary, the uber-entrepreneur.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

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Austin Startup

AUGUST 11, 2017

First, put in the time Every important aspect of your business needs the appropriate amount of time and dedication. And not only do you have to talk about it, be prepared to clear your calendar and devote time — a lot of it — to creating, shaping and reshaping it. Core values vs. culture code — what’s the difference?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

As the product matured, they were able to ratchet up the quality to prevent regression on features that had been truly embraced by their customers. On the negative side, we got a visceral feel for the kinds of changes that could really harm customers, like commits that take the whole site down. And that was not a lot of fun.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 22, 2009 Pivot, dont jump to a new vision In a lean startup , instead of being organized around traditional functional departments, we use a cross-functional problem team and solution team. Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 28, 2008 The lean startup comes to Stanford Im going to be talking about lean startups (and the IMVU case in particular) three times in the next two weeks at Stanford. Labels: events , lean startup 5comments: Hitchens said. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Scalable systems are no exception - if your assumptions about how many customers youll have, or how they will behave are just a little bit wrong, you can wind up with a massive amount of wasted code. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. First of all, why split-test?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. chatted five times?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

All of these are true waste, and they generally happen because somebody is optimizing for their particular part of the puzzle, not for the team as a whole. Labels: agile , listening to customers 3comments: hauteroute said. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. In my role as a CTO, Ive always tried to choose the right tool for the right job.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Supercomputers get Personal Back in Sunnyvale my friend had not only been hired but had convinced the team that we should be building hardware – making a new class of computers not a software application. Wasn’t he a CTO or something? (He We’re building a supercomputer.” We were going to be guessing.

North Carolina 125

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Of the techniques he mentioned, I think four are fundamental and critical for any lean startup: TDD (or the even more politely named TATFT ) Continuous integration Automate your deployments Collect statistics The tools to help you do these things are getting better and better every day, but dont confuse tools with process. Expo SF (May. .

Software Review 68

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Subscribe via email Blog Archive ► 2010 (48) ► October (3) Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware The Lean Startup Bundle Stop lying on stage ► September (4) Good enough never is (or is it?) Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Plus, as product development teams in lean startups become adept at learning-and-discovery (as opposed to just executing to spec), its clear that some bugs shouldnt be fixed. You can keep the team focused on customer-centric results, rather than conformance to spec. There are no customers for that feature, UI issues or no.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

The Startup Toolkit

AUGUST 29, 2012

You don’t need to collect the full set (tech, industry, product, customer, etc). If the founding team is non-technical and you can’t figure out whether you are being screwed by your developers or whether your potential new CTO is amazing, a tech advisor can help by joining you in interviews and reviewing commits.

Technical Review 38

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

October 13, 2008 9:44 PM Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Subscribe via email Blog Archive ► 2010 (48) ► October (3) Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware The Lean Startup Bundle Stop lying on stage ► September (4) Good enough never is (or is it?) Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

Labels: continuous deployment 0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Subscribe via email Blog Archive ► 2010 (48) ► October (3) Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware The Lean Startup Bundle Stop lying on stage ► September (4) Good enough never is (or is it?) Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 1, 2008

Labels: Test-driven development 0comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Subscribe via email Blog Archive ► 2010 (48) ► October (3) Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware The Lean Startup Bundle Stop lying on stage ► September (4) Good enough never is (or is it?)

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

When you have an infinitesimal number of customers, it can be embarrassing. But as long as your ego can take it, there are huge advantages to having a small number of customers. Most importantly, you can get to know those few customers in a way that people with zillions of customers cant. You can even meet the friend.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133