Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 9, 2010 Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# theory of management At any given time, something like four percent of the US population is engaged in some form of new-company-creation. Are we solving the right problem? We can do better by focusing on process instead of personality.

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San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Some companies and founders refuse to serve existing customers, and are always lurching from one great idea to the next. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. Today, I want to talk about the reasons smaller batches are better. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? Returning to our example of the beleaguered founder who still has the pager, before hiring an operations guy, try promoting someone from within to take on the job.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach , a bootstrapped startup that he has been running for seven years. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web. Read on to find out.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration. So we need to find solutions that operate at the systems level to break teams out of this pincer action. Expo SF (May. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Then you set up a web app to co-ordinate volunteers who can wipe a hard drive and install Ubuntu. You can find out more at: manning.com/sande Many thanks in advance, Todd -- Todd Green Manning Publications Co. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. Third, you market it far and wide.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. This is true for split-testing features, but it’s also true for marketing programs or even operations changes. When the incidence rate is small, emails or text messages are a great mechanism. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

You can train your operations or customer service staff on how it works - all live in the production environment. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment. I just dont believe it. Faster (and better) feedback.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

There is not "just product development" in a startup - the context of extreme uncertainty that we operate in means that every choice we make impacts the whole company. August 9, 2009 10:02 AM Mike said. One reason to distinguish between technical design and product design is that technical debt and product debt are different.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Lean startups operate by a different standard. Everything else (including a lot of traditional "agile" or "lean" tactics) is waste. Lean startups operate by a different standard." Eric, what kind of agile or lean tactics are generally wasteful in a startup? aka "how you get to product/market fit.") Expo SF (May.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 23, 2009

Pretty soon you’re chasing your own tail a little bit because you’re not operating against a clear, long-term vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. Combining agile development with customer developm. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you? Expo SF (May.

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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. Executives coming to my product development classes report operating at 98.5

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility. When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. To probe for agility, you have to ask the candidate questions involving something that they know little about. Either way, youll learn something important.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Im Community Manager at VenCorps, co-host of commandN. I worked at Flock, ConceptShare and co-founded Raincity Studios in Vancouver. FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Hi Eric, Will Pate here. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Expo SF (May.

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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. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. why didnt operations get paged? How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Have you met that prickly operations guy who seems to love servers more than people (but would never let them fail on his watch)? ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey.

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San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

The idea was that these two people would operate as a unit, with the mentors job performance during this period evaluated by the performance of the new person. Because this was such a big cultural change for most new employees, we didnt leave them to sink or swim on their own. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

When youve mastered that, consider adding operations, customer service, marketing, product management, business development - the idea is that when the team needs to get approval or support from another department, they already have an "insider" who can make it happen. Lots of little projects erodes teamwork and builds up work-in-progress.

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San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo SF (May.

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

The US is headed to be a second rate or third rate power if policy isn't changed to permit new and ground breaking applications to operate in large networks. Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet Testing the new Disqus comment system Gov 2.0 September 9, 2009 7:00 AM Anonymoussaid. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. This information is normally maintained by your operations team. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. By only releasing vanity metrics , companies co-opt the press into helping them mislead others. Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations.

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San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Agile VC

JUNE 12, 2012

Both are building on top of the existing credit card infrastructure because as Swipely Founder/CEO Angus Davis points out, millions of people are walking around with a mobile payment device in their pocket… it’s called a credit card. Canadian operator Rogers filed to become a bank last year. Any thoughts? link] leehower.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 20, 2009

Heres an excerpt: Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the worlds largest operating systems monopoly. Combining agile development with customer developm. Expo SF (May.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Having worked with dozens of founders over the past few months, I think I can safely say, without naming any names, that most of us are not too clear on what were talking about when it comes to markets. Founders are constantly being barraged by incoherent and contradictory advice. Is a market a set of paying customers? Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

But I think debates about which language, which operating system, even which editor (emacs, vim, Visual Studio) can go on forever. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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PHP Software Review Ruby San Francisco 166