In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. But finding what those “minimum” features are can be an adventure. All the Data and Not a Drop to Think We started Epiphany to solve the “too much data but [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, E.piphany | 7 Comments »
It’s a paradox, but early sales success in a startup can kill its chances of becoming a large successful company. The cause is often sales and marketing execs who’ve become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. As a result they block new iterations of the [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Secret History of Silicon Valley | 13 Comments »
One of the ironies of being a startup is that when you are small no one can put you out of business but you. Paradoxically, as your revenues and market share increase the risk of competitors damaging your company increases. Often the cause is the inability to grow the startup past the worldview of its [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 8 Comments »
It took losing something important to understand the difference between a commodity and an opportunity. Along the way I also learned yet another way entrepreneurs see the world differently from their investors. Advisory Board In the early days of Rocket Science I realized that we needed high-level advice on multiple fronts; technology, game development, video [...]
Filed under: Rocket Science Games | 22 Comments »
I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time articulating why. Here’s one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 47 Comments »
I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 21 Comments »
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