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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. I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

Engineer 224
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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

The VP of Sales and I flew to Providence to convince Andy van Dam at Brown to join our company, or at a minimum lead our advisory board. With a bit of research it turned out that a professor at Brown University had invented something close to what we had in mind. We’re building a supercomputer.”

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The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs

www.instigatorblog.com

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards. Why wouldn’t you?

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Building Great Founding Teams

Steve Blank

(However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.). If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

Cofounder 335
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Is Your VC Founder Friendly?

Steve Blank

Do they “get&# Customer Development ? They understand that now’s not the time to hire a senior VP of Sales to start to scale the sales force or to look for a finance department to create income statements that say zero each month. Do They Get Customer Development? Have they heard about Customer Development ?

Founder 232
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A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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Elephants Can Dance – Reinventing HP « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

Army Signal Corps advisory board, and the Army was going to acquire their first computer for research. It got bigger by inventing new test and measurement equipment and it hired people who knew how to execute that strategy. Terman, who now was the Provost of Stanford, had joined the U.S.