In the 1950’s the U.S. Military and the CIA enlisted balloons (some as tall as a 40-story building) as weapons systems targeting the Soviet Union. Throughout the decade they launched a series of Top Secret/codeword balloon projects and thousands of balloons, to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union. The stories of these programs are interesting [...]
Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley | 7 Comments »
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 of why startups exist: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. A Business [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 64 Comments »
…I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the Promised Land. And I might not get there with you… Martin Luther King The startup founder who gets fired just as his/her company is growing into large company could be a cliché – if it wasn’t so true – and painful. Let’s take a look at [...]
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This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret Historyvideo and slides as well as the bibliography for sources and supplemental reading. ———— The Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic weapon in 1949 and the start of the [...]
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A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Lao-tzu If you read the academic literature or business press, you might believe that large companies and their business models are brought by the stork. This series of posts are going to offer a new three-stage model of how startups grow into large [...]
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Sometimes what sounds like bad news when talking to customers might be your finest hour. Hypothesis Testing As we started E.piphany, we got out of the building to test our hypotheses by talking to potential customers in and around Silicon Valley. On one of our most memorable visits, we met with Joe DiNucci, the VP [...]
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This post is the latest in the “Secret History Series.” They’ll make much more sense if you read some of the earlier ones for context. See the Secret History bibliography for sources and supplemental reading. ———————– The Future is Clear – Microwave Valley Forever In 1956 Hewlett Packard, back then a maker of test equipment was the [...]
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Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood… Daniel Burnham A lot of entrepreneurs think that their startup is the next big thing when in reality they’re just building a small business. How can you tell if your startup has the potential to be the next Google, Intel or Facebook? A first [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Technology, Venture Capital | 19 Comments »
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