Venture Hacks

Go read Eric Ries’ new blog: Startup Lessons Learned. He’s a Venture Advisor at KPCB and a co-founder, CTO, and VPE of IMVU.

Eric blogs about one of my favorite topics: applying lean/agile to startups. Lean thinking is the number one thing you can do to make your startup more effective. His post on A new version of the Joel Test is a great place to start…

On board meetings:

“At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company, and invited all of our advisers to boot. Sometimes it put some serious heat on the management team, but it was well worth it because everyone walked out of that room feeling at a visceral level the challenges the company faced.”

On solitary programmers:

“It’s not true that energized programmers primarily do solitary work; certainly that’s not true of the great agile teams I’ve known. Instead, teams should have their own space, under their control, with the tools they need to do the job.”

On schedules:

“Agile team-building practices make scheduling per se much less important. In many startup situations, ask yourself “Do I really need to accurately know when this project will be done?” When the answer is no, we can cancel all the effort that goes into building schedules and focus on making progress evident. Everyone will be able to see how much of the product is done vs undone, and see the finish line either coming closer or receding into the distance. When it’s receding, we rescope.”

On QA:

“Imagine a world where your QA team never, ever worries about bug regressions. They just don’t happen. All of their time is dedicated to finding novel reproduction paths for tricky issues. That’s possible now, and it means that the historical ratio of QA to engineering is going to have to change (on the other hand, QA is now a lot more interesting of a job).”

SEM on five dollars a day is another great post among many. Thanks to Andrew Chen for bringing this blog to my attention.