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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

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.&#

Engineer 221
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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” We were on the University of North Carolina campus to meet with Fred Brooks and Henry Fuchs.

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

Steve Blank

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. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

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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. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel.

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CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire.NET programmers

blog.expensify.com

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. But finding such people is more than a full time job. Indeed, I spend about half my time on it, while Lisa spends about all hers. But what they do is very, very rarely startups.

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