article thumbnail

Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank

But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. No,” my friend replied, sadly shaking his head, “the rest of the board said it sounded like a good idea.”.

article thumbnail

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. Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

Engineer 198
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Announcing First Round’s Investment in GroupMe

This is going to be BIG.

The path to our involvement with the company dates back to last December, actually, when I attended a Gilt Groupe “Expert Talk” run by Josh Knowles, formally their VP of Engineering. Tags: First Round Capital Venture Capital & Technology nextNY. The next two should get announced in a couple of weeks.

article thumbnail

CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire.NET programmers

blog.expensify.com

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. But finding such people is more than a full time job. Indeed, I spend about half my time on it, while Lisa spends about all hers. Expensify Blog. Sunday edit : Still going!

Java 107