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The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates

Steve Blank

No Knowledge of Computers Silicon Valley emerged from work in World War II led by Stanford professor Fred Terman developing microwave and electronics for Electronic Warfare systems. Silicon Valley wouldn’t have a computer company until 1966 when Hewlett Packard shipped the HP 2116 minicomputer. Parker agreed to invest.

Minnesota 281
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How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality

Version One Ventures

This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company. And she has not only been instrumental to Shippo, but also an extremely valuable resource to other engineering leaders in the Version One family. Functional quality.

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Leadership is More Than a Memo

Steve Blank

I just read Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley has grown to have global influence, in many ways the cultural leadership from the venture community has dramatically shrunk in the last decade. Yes, in the dim past of Silicon Valley the execs really wore suits.).

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Scaling from maker to manager

Version One Ventures

But as the start-up scales and you hire employees, your day-to-day is taken over by more managerial tasks, like hiring and managing people, running company meetings, etc. It’s unusual to hire a non-founder CEO early in a start-up’s life because it will most likely fail. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO.

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. .&# I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. Context here.)

Engineer 198
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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

Lean 165
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You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities

Steve Blank

One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He