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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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Should You Build Out Features Or Create A New Product?

YoungUpstarts

by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. Most of us would want to hire the most experienced, cutthroat lawyer specializing in multimillion-dollar mergers. Do you want the product, or does your target market want the product? Professionalisms Adam Root Hiplogiq product development startup' A DUI lawyer?

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Thoughts on scientific product development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason. Now that is fun.

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Second Startups: Why Founders Often Struggle to Find Their Second Act

View from Seed

The founder may not have been as experienced as they are today, but they have some unique insights about a problem and unique connection to the opportunity that propelled them as a first-time founder. The second time around, it’s much harder to recapture this authenticity. 2: Fleeing from the familiar.

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

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. 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 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. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings.

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What I’ve learned from seeing 20k company pitches

Hippoland

This is one of my favorite startup presentations of all time by Mike Cassidy on going fast. Demonstrate that you can pull the trigger on things quickly — whether it be getting customers, hiring / firing employees, or product development. And convey this in your pitch. But you need to address the landscape.