October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 39. Be Specific
Brad Feld
Brad is a managing director at Foundry Group and one of the co-founders of TechStars.
A company I have a small investment in has been struggling to get the most recent version of their software shipped. A few weeks ago, I ran into the CEO, who grabbed me and said, "We are almost ready to go live." I looked at him and said, "When is the release?" His answer was "Friday."
I gave him a Bronx cheer and said, "When on Friday?" He looked at me like I was an alien. I clarified—"Do you mean 12:01 a.m. on Friday, 4:59 p.m. on Friday, or 11:59 p.m. on Friday?" I then clarified some more: "And I mean in Mountain Time." We agreed that 11:59 p.m. on Friday was a good time (which they missed, but they got it out a few days later).
At my first company (Feld Technologies), our client base got to the point where we were often doing multiple releases of different software on a weekly basis. We were a custom software company but used a very traditional software engineering approach to our projects. For a long time, we used dates to mark releases (for example, "Friday"). After way too many 11:59 p.m. releases when our clients were definitely not sticking around the office to wait for us and missed FedEx deadlines (this was back when you had to FedEx the disks to the clients in another state because modems were too slow to transmit the files), we learned that a release has ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.