sblank

"Accepting payment..." "If you're being paid to be part of the solution then be part of the solution." Funny. That's why most consultants tell the clients what they want to hear.

If I took money for this I'd have lie as well.

the original talk on entrepreneurs as artists can be found at ~18:40 here: http://gigaom.com/2011/03/27/steveblank/

thx. Stackoverflow added.

google apps added. Github, Heroku, Balsmiq and Dropbox are already on the list.

added Quora to the list. anything else missing?

Funny, the article and these comments seem to miss the point. Credentials for what?

If the job requires execution of a known process – automotive repair or neurosurgery I’d want to make sure I’d hire someone who went to the school that had the best experiential training (i.e. residency with lots of hands-on training.)

If the job requires knowledge of specialized science or engineering computations, I’d select students that have gone through a rigorous curriculum in these subjects.

However, if the job requires creative thinking and searching for unknowns, it’s not clear that a brand name school adds any value. I’d be looking for individuals that are curious, agile, relentless, etc.

A few thoughts here about getting an MBA: http://steveblank.com/2010/05/10/entrepreneurial-finishing-s...

"Or do I work for a $big_company?" You may have already answered your question. A startup is not a job choice.

Actually the meme that the "average entrepreneur is over 40" comes from a Kauffman Foundation report that is a great starting point for a discussion. However, it needs to be read very carefully.

The founders referenced in the study are not the typical venture/angel funded technology startups. According to Krisztina Holly, one of the reports authors, “only 11% and 9% for VC and angel financing.” It’s those 20% that I would classify as “Scalable Startups” and where I am really interested in understanding the founders ages.

The rest of the enterprenuers fall into a category I would call “small business.” Nothing wrong with that, but it makes the age comparison an Apples and Oranges discussion.

In summary, the Kauffman report, which lots of people now use to point to the fact that entreprenuers average age is 39, may say that. But it may not. There is not enough information in the current report to understand the founders age in technology startups who get risk capital.

steve

Latest version is here: http://steveblank.com/books-for-startups/ Always looking for new suggestions/additions.

at least half is. that's why the blog updates it with new thinking.

Pilots lives saved ~7,100 according to Martin-Baker the main U.S. seat manufacturer. Technicians killed ~20 My guess based on four years in the Air Force.

Thomas is going to get the cheapest and quickest entrepreneurial education available. Continual customer contact, fail fast, fail cheap, iterate. In two sentences he encapsulates most of the Customer Development philosophy:

"1. now had something out there that people could actually use (and hopefully pay for)

2...now had my mind cleared of a lot that I didn't even realize was clogging it."

Entrepreneurship is a contact sport - No guts no glory.

Entrepreneurs need to keep their eyes on the prize. That was the prize.

When I got my game company funded by VC's in 1993 it was an exception. Sounds like its still true today. The rationale was that VC's don't fund "hits-based" businesses. The feeling was that the game business had additional risk than just a software product. Not only would they be betting whether your startup could actually make and deliver the game, they were betting whether it would be a "hit" like movies, books, and other entertainment. VC's recognized that they had no "gut instinct" for cultural fads. In fact, VC's partnership agreements restricted them from funding real estate, etc. and they felt that games fell into that same hits-based category.

GPUs (i.e. Nvidia and AMD/ATI) are the linear descendants of these supercomputers. Today's standard GPU's have vector processing units with fixed pipelines optimized for graphics operations.

Glen Miranker and Jon Rubenstein of Ardent made their way to Apple where they spec'd/designed the Velocity Engine that went into the PowerPC G4/5. It had a 128-bit vector execution unit that required the use of the AltiVec API.

Walsh worked on the Xerox PARC Bravo word processor with Charles Simonyi and Ben Wegbreit. Followed Wegbreit to Convergent, Ardent and E.piphany. Brilliant architect and coder.

1. Agree with your comments. The text was never intended for a general audience. 2. The "book" is actually my class notes from the Customer Development class I teach at Haas. 3. Students started asking for hard copies of the notes. I sat on the board of Cafepress so as a favor, I bundled the notes together, slapped a cover on it and put it on the cafepress.com site 4. When Eric Ries took my class he pointed out that I could ship the copies to Amazon and that would give others broader access to it. Amazon wanted something more than "these are my class notes" as a description. 5. You can think of the book as a $39 ripoff for class notes, or a steep discount on the $30,000 Haas Business School tuition. 6. The book title was a pun on my last company, Epiphany 7. The web site is a running commentary on the origin of customer development, how the ideas evolved and what they mean

Jeffrey Ventrella and Brian Dodd expanded on these ideas in 1996 with one of the early PC games based on genetic algorithms (at Rocket Science Games.) http://www.ventrella.com/Darwin/darwin.html

Ventrella's main page is worth a look http://www.ventrella.com if you're interested in examples of genetic programing.

thx. Not wisdom, just old.

thanks. always nice to hear.

steve

You couldn't get white onions, because of the war.

Reading list for the Secret History series is here: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/

That's the point I was trying to make in the post. But you said it much clearer than I did.

steve

Thanks for the link to the MIT paper. Wish I had seen it _before_ I wrote the blog post! I would have been much more coherent.

steve

No. The book was the summary of the course notes from the Berkeley/Haas Business School Customer Development class. The stories attempt to add some color to the book.