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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

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Fear is the mind-killer

Startup Lessons Learned

I spent some time with his company before the conference and discussed ways to get started with continuous deployment , including my experience introducing it at IMVU. Moreover, approaching the problem from the direction that I had intuitively is a recipe for never reaching a point where continuous deployment is feasible.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. As usual, a fantastic article. Another great article.

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Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

If you havent seen it, Pascals recent presentation on continuous deployment is a must-see; slides are here. Finally, after launch, 30 professional money managers, having read articles on the company, contacted kaChing out of the blue. “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&#

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Lessons Learned: A new version of the Joel Test (draft)

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 A new version of the Joel Test (draft) (This article is a draft - your comments are especially welcome as I think through these issues. But if you want to practice rapid deployment, you need to be able to deploy that build in one step as well. Please leave feedback!)

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Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. In my role as a CTO, Ive always tried to choose the right tool for the right job. Nice article.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. I'm glad there's a 'name' for this part of the process Eric. I think i must have read this article a few times since you first posted it - mainly as a theoretical excercise. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.