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Leadership is More Than a Memo

Steve Blank

The book explores the role of gender in the tech industry – at startups and venture capital firms – and the interaction between men and women in the two. Among other things the book reminded me how important leadership is in setting startup culture – both consciously and implicitly. It was both eye-opening and cringe-worthy.

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How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality

Version One Ventures

This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company. Sometimes we find that the new code does not play well with old state, or with old code, which is a transient problem that happens during deployment.

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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.

Engineer 224
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Last Chance for Summer Sale Prices

Startup Lessons Learned

A well-known startup innovator, he’s co-founder of the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and author of a new book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers , which brims with unusually direct, useful advice for new and seasoned entrepreneurs alike. The firs step is to write down what you want.

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How to Keep Your Job As Your Company Grows

Steve Blank

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing.

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Dilbert on Cultural Fit

Feld Thoughts

I’ve written before about hiring for cultural fit, and about the importance of prioritizing cultural fit over competence when hiring at startups. I started thinking about it again when I saw this Dilbert comic , because it pokes fun at the culture of startups and their propensity only to hire people who fit into them.

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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. 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.

Lean 165