This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading. This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to [...]
Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley, Venture Capital | 7 Comments »
This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you watch the video or read some of the earlier posts for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading. This is the first of two posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to [...]
Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley, Venture Capital | 4 Comments »
At Ardent we assembled an amazing group of talented engineers to build personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) The company failed. Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets, and with my team [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 12 Comments »
At Ardent we were building personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) While the last post was titled “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job“, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.” I [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 12 Comments »
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 then crisscrossed the country talking to prospective customers – scientists and researchers in advanced corporate R&D centers and universities – to understand their needs. A week might [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development, Marketing, Vertical Markets | 7 Comments »
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 for Ardent’s new personal supercomputer. (See the previous Ardent posts for context.) Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 11 Comments »
Charts like the U.S. Frequency Allocation Chart keep me amused for hours. Download it here. Interesting to consider how many billions of dollars of business is done over the electromagnetic spectrum we didn’t know existed 150 years ago.
Filed under: Technology | 1 Comment »
Some of the most important business lessons are learned in the most unlikely ways. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss. Not a process I recommend, but one in which the lessons stuck for a lifetime. (Read the previous Ardent [...]
Filed under: Ardent | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup | 43 Comments »
Last month on an east coast college tour with my daughter, I found myself in North Carolina for the first time in nearly 24 years. I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. We were on the University [...]
Filed under: Ardent | Tagged: Early Stage Startup | 9 Comments »
The entrepreneur who built the largest startup in the United States is someone you probably never heard of. The guy who replaced him invented the idea of the modern corporation. Understanding the future of entrepreneurship may depend on understanding the contribution each of them made in the past. This is the first of several posts [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | Tagged: Durant, Sloan | 11 Comments »
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