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Leadership is More Than a Memo

Steve Blank

With the reckless and naïve abandon of founders who had no clue what they were about to tackle, we had just started Ardent , a supercomputer company. Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Engineering (one of my mentors and then co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. The next day?

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Pitch Deck Month: The “Where Are You Going?” Slide

View from Seed

Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. As a seed-stage company, it is understandable to have a nascent (or non-existent) product and a barebone team relative to the great ambition of the company. Once you get to this part of the pitch, investors are trying to get a few things out of this slide: The “people roadmap”.

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How to Keep Your Job As Your Company Grows

Steve Blank

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing.

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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. We particularly like this post, Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? , Melissa Bell, Vox.com.

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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use.

Lean 165
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What is a CTO?

Austin Startup

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. The Face of the Product and Technology A CTO is often the face of the technology and product. They will attend conferences and tradeshows to evangelize your product and technology.

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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. I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.

Engineer 198