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The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It’s understanding who to listen to and why. Five…
This post previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Three types of organizations – Incubators, Accelerators and Venture Studios – have emerged to reduce the risk of early-stag…
This article previously appeared in EIX – Entreprenuers and Innovators Exchange. Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees showing up in a physical office have 3½ times higher…
Part of marketing is the ability to communicate a message to thousands of people and convince them to believe your version of reality. When I was 19 I accidentally had a test run of my ability to d…
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times they confuse VC’s with their friends. Lets Go to Lunch At Rocket Scienc…
When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire. — Over thirty years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop compu…
Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups u…
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Ag…
My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they’ve grown older, they’ve heard their parent’s advice about women in the workforce. Th…
I pulled a few pranks in the military, but the one that got pulled on me took years off of my life. Alone in the Cockpit There isn’t anything cooler for a 19-year old then getting into the cockpit …
“I never have let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain Every time I see my graduate students try to teach for the first time, it’s usually so painful I bite my lip. Then I …
Describing your product as “new and “never been done before” instead of “we’re just like those others guys, but better” could cost your company billions. RIM and TiVo are two examples of getting i…
If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collap…
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive emplo…
I had breakfast with two of my ex-students from Singapore who were building a really interesting startup. They were deep into Customer Discovery and presented a ton of customer data on the validity…
Startups need to have a great lawyer, accountant, patent attorney, etc. But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers I was having coff…
This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. ——̵…
In my 21 years of startups I’ve had my ideas “stolen” twice. Once it almost mattered. This is about the time it didn’t. Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not ju…
For those that know me, I’m kind of a “life is too short” kind of guy. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back. However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was rem…
The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model, reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is call…
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research…
The most important early customers for your startup usually turn out to be quite different from who you think they’re going to be. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8…
Remember when the days were long And rolled beneath a deep blue sky Didn’t have a care in the world With mommy and daddy standin’ by But “happily ever after” fails The End o…
As VP of Marketing at our new startup, the CEO literally threw me out of the building and told me not to return until I understood the market and could identify the key applications and customers f…
Once I recovered from burnout at Zilog, I was working less and accomplishing more. I even had time to find a girlfriend who was a contractor to the company. One of her first comments was, “I…
For the next few months I’ll be posting a series of posts on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make my dent in the universe and trying …
When I was a young marketer I learned how to listen to customers by making a fool of myself. Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field …
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote…
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…