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Why vanity metrics are dangerous

Startup Lessons Learned

If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. Have you ever built one of those charts that shows a metric over time, annotated with "key events" that explain what happened to the numbers at key inflection points? Go ahead and try it, then come back.

Metrics 167
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Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Go on an agile diet quickly. With a product development team that is not shipping, any agile methodology will surface major problems quickly. Perhaps they’ll be able to hire someone especially skilled in the marketing skills needed to find this positioning. If you find yourself in this kind of situation, what can you do?

Customer 167
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Lessons Learned: The engineering manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

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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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. Other companies accomplish this by hiring a large staff of content production experts - and get a very good result. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

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The Future of America’s Innovation Economy- Progress and Challenges at the USPTO

David Teten

Dickinson: 3 amendments likely to be offered: 1) Financing 2) Schumer, at request of financial services sector, is thinking of bringing an amendment to the floor re: business method patents. Dickinson: I don’t have a senator; I live in DC. We’ve revectored to an agile development methodology. see what happened there.

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What is a startup?

Startup Lessons Learned

Yet, the real stories of successful startups are full of activities that can rightly be called institution-building: hiring creative employees, coordinating their activities, and creating a company culture that delivers results. The word institution connotes bureaucracy, process, even lethargy. How can that be part of a startup?

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Lessons Learned: Where did Silicon Valley come from?

Startup Lessons Learned

Among those: plentiful financing and nerds , a culture that celebrates both failure and success, and an ethos of openness and sharing. Stevey's Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campa. Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 11, 2008 Where did Silicon Valley come from?