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Leadership is More Than a Memo

Steve Blank

I just read Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley has grown to have global influence, in many ways the cultural leadership from the venture community has dramatically shrunk in the last decade. Yes, in the dim past of Silicon Valley the execs really wore suits.).

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Scaling from maker to manager

Version One Ventures

A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield , including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company. Growing with your start-up can be a very tough undertaking for a founder. It requires reinventing yourself dramatically in very little time.

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Startup Founders: What To Do When Your Company Fires You

ReadWriteStart

And if you’re the founder of a successful startup and you’re not named Mark Zuckerberg, there’s the day when you’re replaced as CEO. He’s learned to see the founder pink slip’s silver lining. “An But other founders are more like, ‘This is my baby and there’s no way you’re taking it away from me,’” Feinleib says. There’s death.

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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. As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley.

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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. Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

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You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities

Steve Blank

One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He

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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

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. The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title “the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley”.