Steve Blank
JANUARY 25, 2011
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling.
Startup Lessons Learned
DECEMBER 1, 2014
Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.
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Steve Blank
OCTOBER 19, 2009
While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.
Steve Blank
JUNE 25, 2009
Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 5, 2009
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.”
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody. Being a manager didnt sound fun - deep down, who really wants to be held accountable for other peoples actions? So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering.
Startup Lessons Learned
DECEMBER 7, 2008
In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. The last thing you need is a manager telling you how to do your job.
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