Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? 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." I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. This doesn’t mean just more technology stuff, though we’ll get that. Over the last half a century, Silicon Valley has grown into the leading technology and innovation cluster for the United States and the world.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, June 2, 2010 The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. You can view previous essays in this series here: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Speed up or slow down?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. What started as a technical problem actually turned out to be a human and process problem. We didnt even practice TDD across our whole team.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

Greycroft is Alan’s venture capital firm that recently raised its second fund ($130 million) with offices in both New York and LA. We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc.

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PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, January 7, 2010 Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? for Harvard Business Review) Im excited to have just published the first of several articles on entrepreneurship for the Harvard Business Review online. Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? - Without further ado.

San Francisco 119

San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 A new version of the Joel Test (draft) (This article is a draft - your comments are especially welcome as I think through these issues. Notice that none of those five reasons deals with TDD or automated testing, which have changed the game. Please leave feedback!)

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. The last thing you need is a manager telling you how to do your job.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Published on: July 13, 2011 Posted By Angie Tags: Elizabeth Knopf , Finding A Co-Founder , FounderDating , Sorced , Technical Co-Founder , Tips & Tricks. After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development.

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Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, September 11, 2009 The cardinal sin of community management Once you have a product launched, you will the face the joys – and the despair – of a community that grows up around it. There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” I learned a lot at Convergent, going from product marketing manager in a small startup to VP of Marketing of the Unix Division as it became a public company.

Entrepreneur 290

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 290

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

They are leaders, visionaries, founders and managers having tremendous success. I was the junior guy on a project team; I was called in to do some technical due diligence for reasons that were obscure to me, because the team already had much more senior engineers assigned to it. As a technical fix, it was brilliant.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

And a special thanks is due to all of our presenters, panelists, and mentors. When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. If thats true, its primarily due to your hard work, building companies and testing new ideas. We all owe you.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

You’ve got a great idea and domain expertise, but limited money and insufficient technology resources. 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.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Mari is now building a new venture in human-machine interaction within the Samsung accelerator, currently in stealth mode. Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. It comes as no surprise as technology today enables companies to prove product-market fit much earlier in their lifecycles.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. It had a pretty good technical design. That "good design" turned out to be technical debt, after all.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

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?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective.

Software Review 68

Software Review San Francisco Technical Review Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Rather, I see it as a reflection of a worldwide openness to new ideas about entrepreneurship. Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is - and just how little we really know about it.

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. I do this as a core part of the Product Management process I use at all startups. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. Safely because it is clear that the manager in question didnt do his homework. Leave a comment or reply to someone else.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build a world-class technology platform, with patent-pending algorithms and the ability to scale to millions of simultaneous users. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. As far as I know, there are no products that are immune from the technology life cycle adoption curve. We can skip the chasm.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

The person running the meeting does not have to be a manager or executive. That’s because Five Whys will often pierce the illusion of separate departments and discover the human problems that lurk beneath the surface of supposedly technical problems. This should make it easy to get buy-in from other managers or executives.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Heres the short version: hire people from the online communities that develop free software. Yes, you may be more familiar with the term open source, but lets give credit where credit is due , at least for today). Ignore the famous people who are busy giving lots of speeches about how technology X will change the world.

Software Review 68

Software Review Software Hiring San Francisco 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Id like to talk about a technique Ive used to help manage this growth without slowing down. Playing with new technologies. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers. Yet the great companies manage to handle growth while keeping the resources dedicated to maintenance and scalability mostly fixed.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? What is customer development?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. Or follow all of the New York Times columnists equally? There are too many products clamoring for attention.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Part of this is due to their determination to overtake us, but part is due to structural changes in the nature of entrepreneurship. The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource -- the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. But today, it is getting harder and harder to maintain.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Managing timelines instead of queues. Inflexibility.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Code reviews and pairing Great practices. They’ll increase code quality, prevent defects and educate your developers. However, hindsight indicates we forgot to do something important when developing IMVU: When the product changed, we did not update the code to reflect the new product, leaving us with piles of dirty code.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Due to an interaction effect between your hardware, solar flares, and quantum flux, this virus will crash your computer and erase your hard drive sometime soon. Managing these situations is hard for any company, but potentially lethal for a startup. Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 5, 2009 The curse of prevention Beware!

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.&# And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Especially in teams that are managing by objectives (or OKRs), the pressure to deliver is intense.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And do your customer development. Im also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. When they could hear the customers complaints in their own voice, it became clear when it was time to up the quality level. You can learn more about that by reading The engineering managers lament.)

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. So when we start checking in code more often, release more often, or conduct more frequent design reviews, we can actually do a lot to make those steps dramatically more efficient. If peer pressure doesnt work then it looks like a management problem.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

From a technical point of view, its amazing. But from a customer experience point of view, Im not yet sold. All I see is a name, an icon, a price, the developers name, and a review star-rating. The reviews are all over the map. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74