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Last Chance for Summer Sale Prices

Startup Lessons Learned

Post by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts for The Lean Startup Conference At this year’s Lean Startup Conference , we seek to answer the difficult questions you face as an entrepreneur. In his book and on his blog, Ben tackles that question. Ben then gives more detail on how to turn the criteria into a real hire.

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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 221
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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard. Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job.

CTO 168
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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. We’re building a supercomputer.”

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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

The VP of Engineering says, “well we don’t have the resources or time, and as long as you know we could build better computers then you guys, why don’t you tell us the details about your computers.” Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back. Help them?!! So, here is my assignment.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. 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. Just change it.

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Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor

Seeing Both Sides

As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. TripAdvisor, in effect, was a model lean start-up with an engineering-driven, product-focused founder.