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The rise of developers -- as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class -- is a direct result of "software eating the world", since every company is a tech company (whether they know it or not). Developers are therefore the key to solving business problems and to thriving not just surviving, argues Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, in his new book, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Lawson shares hard-earned lessons learned, mindsets, and tactics -- from "build vs. buy" to "build vs. die", to the art and science ("mitosis") of small teams -- for leaders and companies of all sizes and kinds.
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As companies evolve -- especially from product to sales to scaling operations -- so must the leaders. But can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made? Two enterprise startup CTOs share a glimpse into their journeys on the question of to CEO or not to CEO; managing their psychology and tactics for managing transitions; and much more.
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Since the startup (and founder) journey doesn't go neatly linear from technical to product to sales, tightening one knob (whether engineering or marketing or pricing & packaging) creates slack in one of the other knobs, which demands turning to yet another knob. So how do you know what knob to focus on and when? How do you build the right team for the right play and at the right time?
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One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. The concept can be defined many ways, but the simple definition shared in this episode is: it’s when you understand the business value of your product.