Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 15, 2020

For early-stage startups, the goodwill component can easily exceed the size of all the financial elements together, or can just as easily mark a company with good financials as not investable. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company. Strategic proficiency.

Valuation 311

Valuation Technical Review Due Diligence Leadership 311

SoCal CTO

MAY 21, 2012

So, here goes: Dr. Tony Karrer Over the past 15 years, Tony has been a part-time CTO for more than 30 startups. Select Startup CTO Speaking Topics Ten Lessons from Working on 30+ Startups Over the Past 15 Years Tony looks back over his experience working with startups and extracts elements that have led to success or failure.

Fractional CTO 175

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Startup Social Network 175

SoCal CTO

APRIL 2, 2013

I'm going to be looking at aspects like: Things to consider before building your MVP Features often overlooked when documenting an MVP for developers Understanding important metrics you want to measure Risks and challenges in developing an MVP. What's Going to Go Wrong A lot of founders don't really understand Lean Startup principles.

Technical Cofounder 219

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Developers Software Development 219

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: [link] There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." Juan Diego Calle CEO Dharmesh Shah Co-founder & CTO Ross Snyder Sr.

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. Jim Murphy is a long-time agile practitioner in startups. But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Creators of new products in environments of extreme uncertainty, startups face enormous risks. As a startup owner, what can you do to improve your chances? Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

Change is about the only thing constant in the world of startups. Since the startup environment is usually more volatile, the challenge there in balancing advantage, risk, and performance, is more critical than in big companies. Increase change agility. This requires leadership, teamwork, and trust at all levels.

Agile 290

Agile Startup Metrics Leadership 290

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. His keynote will kick off the day as well as our module on the build phase of the fundamental feedback loop that powers all startups.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 6, 2008 Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile I thought Id share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view. Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 22, 2023

For example, founder Blake Mycoskie of TOMS shoes inspired everyone by highlighting and effectively communicating the higher purpose from of helping the needy by donating a pair of shoes for every pair sold. Use metrics and data to quantify progress and return. Incent high employee engagement and accountability.

Metrics 279

Metrics Startup Agile Salary 279

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2015

It’s no secret that setting goals is critical to achieving any kind of success, and making sure they’re realistic and measurable is vital to maintaining momentum and motivation, especially in the startup game. The challenge for most startups is that they don’t just have a few goals — they have every goal. How OKRs Can Help.

Agile 100

Agile Startup Cofounder Metrics 100

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. Importantly we also discussed: should startups raise small amounts of money or large? how should you organize teams in a startup? 01:17 Background, before the Lean Startup.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The Lean Startup at Agile Vancouver April 21st A surprising number of respondents in the latest Lessons Learned survey hail from one of the flourishing startup hubs in Canada. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

SoCal CTO

APRIL 28, 2014

I guess it should not be a surprise that Founders have lots of challenges working with developers. Challenges I started by asking the founders in the room to tell me some of the challenges they have working with developers. Developers (and Founders) are challenged to know how much is okay in terms of bugs.

Technical Cofounder 280

Technical Cofounder Developer Fractional CTO CTO Hire 280

View from Seed

MAY 14, 2019

A number of blog posts recently have mentioned this, but we seem to be experiencing a rise in repeat founders starting new businesses and raising seed capital. We’re also seeing a wave of folks who were not founders, but were star players among the first 25 folks at a unicorn company also starting new companies.

Founder 256

Founder Agile Cofounder Seed Capital 256

YoungUpstarts

MAY 30, 2019

by Will Koffel , head of the Google Cloud Startup Program in the Americas. In 2013, I left a CTO job overseeing a 50-person product engineering team for the same job at a four-person startup. ” Most early startups don’t understand the distinction between the two.

Management 138

Management Product SCRUM Early Stage 138

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

Aaron Dignan --who has described himself as "obsessed with organizational adaptivity" --is one of the speakers at this year’s Lean Startup Conference in Las Vegas , where he’ll be talking about How to Reinvent Your Organization. I feel like I do Lean Startup when I'm picking toothpaste. What are my assumptions? And guess what?

Lean 83

Lean Founder Las Vegas Startup 83

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 7, 2022

After many years in business, working in large companies as well as startups, I’m no longer surprised at why mature and successful companies struggle with introducing innovative new ventures as the market and environment changes. Your challenge is to balance the challenge of providing a stable return today, with meeting future customer value.

Advisory Board 359

Advisory Board Incubator Dilution Agile 359

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

Just look at the disruptive challenges that businesses face today– globalization, China as a manufacturer, China as a consumer, the Internet, and a steady stream of new startups. Perhaps that’s because where established companies might see risks or threats, startups see opportunity.

Private Equity 328

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 328

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

For early-stage startups, the goodwill component can easily exceed the size of all the financial elements together, or can just as easily mark a company with good financials as not investable. For startups, the entrepreneur and founder is almost always the face of the company. Strategic proficiency.

Leadership 120

Leadership Technical Review Due Diligence Valuation 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, June 2, 2010 The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline.

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 7, 2016

Every startup begins with an idea, but from that point forward, it’s all about execution. Founders soon learn that customers only spend real money for solutions rather than ideas. Set business goals and milestones, and use metrics to track performance. A great business must be agile.

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Architecture Agile Business Model 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 31, 2018

One of the speakers at this year’s Lean Startup Conference , which kicks off on November 14th in Las Vegas, is Giff Constable. He was most recently VP of product at Axial, a fintech startup that connected medium-sized businesses with capital providers and buyers, where he oversaw product management, engineering and design.

Lean 335

Lean Las Vegas Startup Dividend 335

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. Let’s start with the startup personality attributes. for my more expansive definition).

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 25, 2011

It’s been just over a year since the inaugural Startup Lessons Learned conference , and it’s time to do it again. The Lean Startup movement has made tremendous progress in the past year. Kent Beck himself helped us explain that “quality work” means something different when we’re facing the extreme uncertainty of a startup.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Silicon Valley Lean Agile 146

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, its easy to lose track of positioning effects when optimizing for a single metric.

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 16, 2009 What is Lean about the Lean Startup? That foundational idea, so clearly articulated in books like Lean Thinking, is what originally led me to start using the term lean startup. The following is a guest post for Startup Lessons Learned by the legendary Kent Beck.

Lean 140

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2020

In the spirit of helping you avoid some of our own learning experiences with startups, I will paraphrase here the nine key stages that he and I both see most businesses going through in their evolution from a startup to a successful and stable entity: You can’t sustain a business without positive cash flow.

Metrics 351

Metrics Agile Hiring Matching 351

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2020

I’m sure you have all seen entrepreneurs and startups with great ideas that never seem to live up to their potential, while others with more mundane solutions seem to take off quickly and never slow down. If you tell me that you have been working on your startup for two years, but can’t quite quantify the progress, I’m not impressed.

Advisory Board 308

Advisory Board Agile Social Media Metrics 308

BeyondVC

APRIL 4, 2018

There will also still be some amazing companies that raise their Series C, D and beyond funding rounds with scaling metrics. There will also be the few new SaaS app founders who have incredible domain expertise reinventing pieces of the old guard public SaaS companies.

Cloud 60

Cloud Agile Architecture Azure 60

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century entrepreneurship education fell into two categories: 1) starting small businesses and 2) starting high-growth, high-risk scalable startups. The case method and business plans are the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create startups. Neither cases nor business plans replicate the actual startup experience.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

But the thing I am most proud of about Rob is that he has taken a company with a uniquely talented founder & CTO – Nick Halstead – and managed to build a very tight working relationship with Nick where we drive world-class product development without having the usual founder / CEO conflicts. The Agile Board.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 4, 2008 Principles of Lean Startups, presentation for Maples Investments Image via Wikipedia Steve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. Agile software development. you get the idea.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Building a new startup hub Last week, I had a unique opportunity to spend some time in Boulder at the behest of TechStars. It was a great experience to see a relatively new startup hub in action - and thriving. Their model looks like a key ingredient in the startup brew there.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, January 12, 2010 Amazing lean startup resources A year ago, there was no lean startup movement. I continue to believe that the explosion of interest in the lean startup has very little to do with me. If you are attempting to apply lean startup ideas in your own business - you are not alone.

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146