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The terms “CTO&# and “VP Engineering&# have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#.
It was like having a bunch of mini- Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions all in one room. Structure development contracts appropriately or directing the in-house team appropriately. Structure development contracts appropriately or directing the in-house team appropriately. Would you create contracts without an attorney?
Would you create contracts without an attorney? Specifically, they should know about, and help with: Asking and answering the 53 Questions Developers Should Ask Innovators Knowing when and how to bring on development talent ( Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit? , Strategy can be had on a part-time basis.
WordPress - we spent quite a bit of time talking about how you could do a lot with WordPress to provide simple forms of lots of functionality. We end up using WordPress a lot as the marketing front-end of our web sites. If you do not break it down into small pieces, its hard to make progress with part-time resources, freelancers, etc.
I’m challenged getting developers to work with me when I can’t pay them market wages. I.e., they need a developer more than they need a CTO. I just had a fellow CTO ask me about a particular technical design problem and several directions they could go and ask for my thoughts on the tradeoffs for those different choices.
Some great posts from April 2010 that talk to me in terms of being a CTO at a Startup. Redeye VC , April 13, 2010 Startup Development - SoCal CTO , April 23, 2010 Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering? Ben Casnocha: The Blog , April 15, 2010 Everyone I spoke with loved the idea.
In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. You may have an opinion on your market-entry strategy for Europe. The Agile Board.
Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours. Zach Cutler , The Cutler Group.
Uber , Zenefits , Tanium , Lending Club CEOs of companies with billion dollar market caps have been in the news – and not in a good way. Hire a CEO to Go Public. The VCs would hire a CEO with a track record who looked and acted like the type of CEO Wall Street bankers expected to see in large companies.
Sales & Marketing. Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? The terms “CTO” and “VP Engineering” have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. Start-up Advice. Angel Topics.
As a result, entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, marketers, and anyone in between can take advantage. They hire a team, spend months planning, their engineers build it, and… the final product isn’t quite right. To go back to the drawing board would require time and money most small businesses can’t afford.
Starting around 2004 and 2005 I began seeing an increasing number of teams moving to Agile, and of course the first thing they needed was training and often some coaching. I thought - incorrectly it turns out - that this would be a temporary issue, while the Agile community gained experience, especially with commercial product companies.
aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. Call it facts for hire. It would be a bit like the hired gun in the old west, but more suited for today’s times.
The result is a combination of design thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Scrum, and Ignacio’s innovation team includes 25 coaches who train employees in PACE best practices. LESSON #3: Avoid these three hiring mistakes. When it comes time to grow your team, Jeff Jordan and Eric pointed out three hiring mistakes to avoid.
Ben uses the analogy of war time vs. peace time. We focus on scale and execution during times of peace, but once we encounter serious threats to our business from changing technology, evolving markets, and emerging competitors, this requires a war time mindset and a relentless focus on continuous innovation.
I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. Putting forward the right product for the market is absolutely key, but don’t confuse that with putting forward the BEST product.
Content companies, for example, should be able to amass traffic and sell advertising on a bootstrapped budget before they come close to seeking equity financing—because you can, and because that’s the market expectation and that’s what your competitors are already doing. Maybe you meet a CTO who is tired of working with ad agencies.
A description of your target market or the different market segments you’re targeting. If you don’t know how to define your target market, read Tim Berry’s article on how to do it, or read this article that explains what target marketing is and how to use it to your advantage. How to Do Market Research.
When we were left to our own devices in that conference room, our CTO and I wrote down our goals, our aspirations, our fears, and everything in between. We wrote things like what five traits a new hire should have, or values everyone in the company should act on. Never stop the hunt for product market fit.”
She would be the cashier, cook, marketer, and any other role that was needed. She applied guerrilla marketing principles before the term was even invented. She served her customers top quality meats and produce in a time when everyone was focused on quantity and low price. 8 – You cant change the world working parttime.
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."
This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.
And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant.
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. All three probably make attempts at world-of-mouth marketing - its just that for Viral, its life-or-death. Its simply too hard to focus on more than one.
But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.
In the early fall of 2009, as kaChing prepared for its marketplace launch, the management team showed the app—which included real timemarket data, SEC-grade accounting, analytics, compliance and customer management tools—to a number of investment pros to get feedback and endorsements. That all-hands lasted five minutes.
Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. As Steve writes in the Four Steps to the Epiphany , we always seek to find a market for the product as currently specified , not conduct a focus group to tell us what the spec should be. So how do you know its time to change direction?
Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.
There was a time when "web content" was considered "not code" and therefore not routinely source controlled. I know plenty of people who prefer more advanced source control system, but my belief is that many agile practices diminish the importance of advanced features like branching. Can you make a build in one step? Youd better.
In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. What about a hardware business with some long-lead-time components? Expo SF (May.
As Eric said, “at IMVU, ‘release’ is a marketing term&#. For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. Im an ex-Googler, and now a CTO of a small company with lots of talented people ([link] I discovered your site not long ago, and I am learning a lot from it. Expo SF (May.
This means optimizing everything possible in order to attract the maximum number of users for the longest amount of time. In traditional marketing there are three main objectives. Max Levchin of Slide and Paypal has noted that 10% of Slides headcount is devoted to metrics only. These involve persuading people to: 1. Expo SF (May.
Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. Probably if I had been an experienced marketer, I would have known that tiny volume to be insignificant, and I would have been embarrassed. But anyone who had done direct response marketing before would have known better.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 2, 2008 Just-In-Time Scalability At my previous company, we pioneered an approach to building out our infrastructure that we called "Just-In-Time Scalability." You can also download our presentation, " Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth."
All of these are true waste, and they generally happen because somebody is optimizing for their particular part of the puzzle, not for the team as a whole. Labels: agile , listening to customers 3comments: hauteroute said. Split-test experiments that go on forever? Great points Eric. Expo SF (May.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.
This is what brand marketers and consumer packaged goods companies have been studying and refining for years: how to win the battle in your mind before you ever set foot in the store. In other markets, he who controls the directory has the power, like Download.com in the world of windows shareware. Sound familiar? Expo SF (May.
vs. sustainable: Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. Problem is, you inevitably become yesterday’s old news. Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your code right now A great checklist of techniques and tools for making your development more agile, written from a Rail perspective. Expo SF (May.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.
Web Startup Lessons Advice from a CTO and Entrepreneur Home About Finding a Technical Partner for Your Startup Today I received an inquiry from a student at an Ivy League university who wants to launch a web startup. Or you can find seed-stage investors who will give you the money to hire a developer. You have two avenues open to you.
Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May. Conference streaming, sponsors, discounted tickets. Learning is better than optimization (the local ma.
We had all the tools in place but we didn’t actually practice agile development. No fancy tools needed here — it’s about the mentality, attention to detail, and the actions that foster agile development, not the tools & systems you set up in place to facilitate this. . Expo SF (May.
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