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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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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process. Since that time we've seen a massive change from product engineering to financial engineering.

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Lessons Learned: About the author

Startup Lessons Learned

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. My first time at your blog.

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Lessons Learned: Just-In-Time Scalability

Startup Lessons Learned

Waves of technology platforms The lean startup Customer Development Engineering Greasemonkey compiler Great open source scalability tools from Danga Ideas. Q&A with an actual reader The lean startup comes to Stanford You don't need as many tools as you think The three drivers of growth for your business mode.

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Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot

Startup Lessons Learned

“Some people weren’t comfortable because it wasn’t as fun, and one senior engineer thought we’d be losing the part of kaChing that was an enabler for anyone who wanted to make it as a pro,&# Rachleff recalls. “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&#