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Why The Government is Isn’t a Bigger Version of a Startup

Steve Blank

Some of the best and brightest wanted to work for defense contractors or corporate research and development labs. Indeed, Silicon Valley was born as a center for weapon systems development and its software and silicon helped end the Cold War. The table below summarizes a few of the salient differences.

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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. Defects are cheapest to address when found early.

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10 Silicon Valley Facts Every Entrepreneur Should Know

YoungUpstarts

Silicon Valley – a fantastic moniker that conjures lots of images, right? Like all those giant companies, Silicon Valley essentially started with a garage. It was in their garage in Palo Alto that paved the way to the rise of Silicon Valley. But why “Silicon Valley”? The “starters”?

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Observations from my trip to India

Version One Ventures

It’s obviously very large, but most start-up activity is concentrated in a few cities: Bangalore (the “Silicon Valley” of India), Delhi (the 33m strong capital of India), Mumbai (the financial capital) and Chennai. Many of the most talented entrepreneurs and engineers left India to study and then work in the US and Canada.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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How to Configure Your Startup Team

Both Sides of the Table

PM’s are underrated in Silicon Valley these days. Engineering is critical but it is not everything. Without strong PMs you build crappy products that nobody needs or that real people can’t use. For the wrong reasons. PMs are a vital part of a tech startup.

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Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. However its focus was nuclear weapons – not something you wanted to be spinning out. Today the U.C.