Comments on: Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

By: steveblank

steveblank — Tue, 25 May 2010 08:05:47 +0000

Tom McMurray.

By: Peter Kazanjy

Peter Kazanjy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:36:43 +0000

Yup. On the VMware Fusion team, we required anyone on the marketing team to a. be a user of software (for the consumer use case). The team had to live in Office 2007 for Windows, running virtualized on their Macs. and b. had to know how to administer Mac IT environments and Windows IT environments.

If they didn’t know how to talk to an IT guy who had 100 Mac users needing Outlook, but needing Active Directory…well…they couldn’t be on the team.

By: George John

George John — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:43:12 +0000

Steve – who was the fluid dynamics PhD that you helped turn into a Sequoia VC?

By: Ardent War Story 6: Listen more, talk less « Steve Blank

Ardent War Story 6: Listen more, talk less « Steve Blank — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:02:43 +0000

[...] Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers [...]

By: A diagnostic for startup marketing departments « Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

A diagnostic for startup marketing departments « Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:35:29 +0000

[...] via Steve Blank. [...]

By: Fred H Schlegel

Fred H Schlegel — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:20:02 +0000

I believe the MBA was originally developed with the idea of helping functional experts move more smoothly into upper management ranks. Unfortunately it became a gatekeeper degree of a sorts allowing all sorts of folks to sidestep real business experience. Your approach here makes much more sense, but I imagine requires more management effort overall and risks honest, unvarnished appraisals reaching sensitive ears. In all a good thing.

By: steveblank

steveblank — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:27:00 +0000

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705

By: Chris Ryland

Chris Ryland — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:24:27 +0000

Yep, we did exactly that at Multiflow.

We basically had a retainer with one of the pioneering folks in computational chemistry, who ported and tuned his company’s application for our rather radical architecture, and also acted as a marketeer for us in that (then quite nascent) field.

Mutliflow is now long gone (along with all these minisuper/personal supercomputer companies), but these chemistry folks are still going strong.

By: Jose Diaz-Gonzalez

Jose Diaz-Gonzalez — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:25:22 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree with your advice. As part of a small web dev shop, it’s harder to explain to the business people why XYZ can or cannot function as they want when they don’t understand my area of expertise, but it is easy to explain to the client why our products will help them do their job better because of my domain experience. I think it’s something our business people realize, as they are actively reaching out to the web development community and attending meetups and conferences in things they don’t have any knowledge of, but give them a taste of what our job is like every day.

I look forward to your future articles, probably the most insightful reading I’ve done all year.

By: steveblank

steveblank — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:22:59 +0000

Quick fixed.
Update: Fixed a second time.

thanks to all.

By: Andy Wright

Andy Wright — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:25:56 +0000

Thanks for the insights, but I have one question — do you have any articles or blog posts that talk about what’s in “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.”

By: gvb

gvb — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:04:49 +0000

Thanks for the fascinating blog posts. English oops:

“You Know Your Getting Close to Your Customers When Your Offer Them a Job.”
should be: “You Know You're Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.”