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Recent offsite blog posts

Appreciate Why Prospects Say “Your Baby Is Ugly”
Posted on 09/03/2010 - 00:23 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
My second job out of college was with an  early EDA software startup. I was employee #13 and I was a “project manager, marketing and sales.” Which meant in reality that I did both pre and post-sales support.  Over time I focused more on post sales  support but in the beginning there were just two of us handling all of the prospects and customers from technical support perspective.  They hired a third pre-sales support engineer and the three of us worked at common table with one phone....
Demos, Early Customer Stage
Blocking/Non-blocking Transport Adaption in VMM 1.2
Posted on 09/01/2010 - 19:20 by John Aynsley from the site Verification Martial Arts
John Aynsley, CTO, Doulos One neat feature of the SystemC TLM-2.0 standard is the ability provided by the so-called simple target socket to perform automatic adaption between the blocking and non-blocking transport calls; an initiator that calls b_transport can be connected to a target that implements nb_transport, and vice-versa. VMM 1.2 provides similar functionality using the vmm_connect utility. vmm_connect serves four distinct purposes in VMM 1.2....
Interoperability, Reuse, SystemC/C/C++, Transaction Level Modeling (TLM), VMM 1.2
Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption
Posted on 09/01/2010 - 22:57 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
--> Get Adobe Flash player --> I did this with the DreamSimplicity folks last month. It’s a chart I have been drawing in various customer meetings for the last several years or so and they thought it would make for a good short video. The challenge was lighting the whiteboard appropriately.  I think it came out well. I welcome any feedback or suggestions for other topics. I will post a transcript next week. ...
Customer Development, Early Customer Stage, skmurphy
Quotes For Entrepreneurs–August 2010
Posted on 08/31/2010 - 09:20 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. You can also buy the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2 + + + “I don’t watch metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make metrics-based decisions on a daily basis” Patrick Mackenzie From “Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator” an interview with Patrick Mackenzie Q: Can you share the key metrics you watch on a daily basis?...
Quotes, skmurphy
Feed Readers De-Mystified at Sep-23 Lunch & Learn Webinar
Posted on 08/30/2010 - 00:57 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
I will be giving a short presentation on  “Feed Readers De-Mystified–Tips For Keeping Informed” at the September 23 Lunch & Learn Webinar hosted by People on the Go. Cost: No Charge When: Thursday, September 23, 2010 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM PDT Register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/151449787 I will outline some important ways to monitor information about your business and industry on the web....
Events, Tools for Startups
Bootstrapping Mightyverse Talk at Sep-1 Breakfast in SF
Posted on 08/30/2010 - 22:46 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Sarah Allen will talk about bootstrapping a mobile startup at the  Bootstrapper’s Breakfast Wednesday September 1 at 9am at Boudin Bakery, Embarcadero 4 in San Francisco. Sarah is a serial entrepreneur who is using her  software development consulting business, Blazing Cloud, to bootstrap a mobile-focused startup, Mightyverse. The Mightyverse blog offers this overview of the service: Mightyverse is for people interested in language....
Events, skmurphy
10 Tips For Choosing a Business Partner at WIC Sep-13
Posted on 08/28/2010 - 01:03 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Theresa Shafer and I are giving a talk on “10 Tips on How to Choose a Business Partner” on Monday, September 13, 2010, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm at the Women In Consulting (WIC) South Bay meeting. Theresa Shafer and Sean Murphy, consultants at SKMurphy, Inc. will outline important tips and things to consider when choosing a partner, sub-contractor, or alliances members that will help grow your business. We will explore a range of working relationships including employees, contractors, alliances, partners and co-owners....
Events, skmurphy
Debugging Teams/Meetings: Start With Goals & Roles
Posted on 08/28/2010 - 23:55 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Startups have fewer meetings than larger companies but entrepreneurs still need to make those meetings effective, in fact there is less margin for unproductive meetings in a startup than there is in a larger firm....
Rules of Thumb, skmurphy
Vaporware, Slideware or Software?
Posted on 08/27/2010 - 15:46 by Andrew Piziali from the site Verification Martial Arts
The Role of the Technical Marketing Engineer in Verification by Andrew Piziali, Independent Consultant In our previous blog posts on the subject of verification for designers we addressed the role of the architect, software engineer and system level designer. We now turn our attention to perhaps the least understood—and oftentimes most vilified—member of the design team, the technical marketing engineer. But, before we explain why, what is the role of the technical marketing engineer?...
Uncategorized
Vaporware, Slideware or Software?
Posted on 08/27/2010 - 16:58 by Andrew Piziali from the site Verification Martial Arts
The Role of the Technical Marketing Engineer in Verification by Andrew Piziali, Independent Consultant In our previous blog posts on the subject of verification for designers we addressed the role of the architect, software engineer and system level designer. We now turn our attention to perhaps the least understood—and oftentimes most vilified—member of the design team, the technical marketing engineer. But, before we explain why, what is the role of the technical marketing engineer?...
Uncategorized
Pat Pistilli Selected to Receive Phil Kaufman Award
Posted on 08/26/2010 - 10:00 by JL Gray from the site Cool Verification
I've just received word that this year's Phil Kaufman award will be given to Pat Pistilli. Pat "will receive this year’s Phil Kaufman Award for pioneering the electronic design automation (EDA) industry and building the Design Automation Conference as its......
Uncategorized
3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Customers, Features, Message
Posted on 08/26/2010 - 23:34 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
We put the interview I did with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity about a month ago but in the last two days I have had two people comment to me directly and one tweet about my “three equations and three unknowns” answer: @dorait Sean: Startups are trying to solve 3 equations with three unknowns – http://bit.ly/dq7Sqd Here is the relevant excerpt from the transcript: FLOYD TUCKER:  [...] Can you tell me a little bit about the early customer stage? SEAN MURPHY: We just spend a lot of time on this.  It’s a very...
Customer Development, Demos, Early Customer Stage, skmurphy
Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups Part 2
Posted on 08/25/2010 - 22:51 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Ed Weissman (edw519 on HN) had another  great comment recently on Hacker News at  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424446 that builds on “Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups” (I have added some hyperlinks for context) Enterprise software sucks. We don’t talk about it much here at HN, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once....
Early Customer Stage, skmurphy
Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups
Posted on 08/24/2010 - 01:46 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Ed Weissman (edw519 on HN) had a great comment a while back on Hacker News at  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83561 that I got his permission to re-publish here: My target market is small business. 3 Reasons They Prefer Pay Over Free: They don’t want their employees looking at ads. They need leverage when they have complaints....
Early Customer Stage, Rules of Thumb, skmurphy
SVCC 2010 “Will Work For Equity” Startup CEO Panel Members
Posted on 08/24/2010 - 23:04 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
I mentioned on August 12  in “Signup For ‘Will Work For Equity’ at Silicon Valley Code Camp” that I had submitted the following session  for this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp (Oct 9-10 at Foothill College): Will Work For Equity – the World Startups Are you considering joining a startup?...
Events
Using VMM Consensus to end your test
Posted on 08/23/2010 - 16:59 by JL Gray from the site Verification Martial Arts
Asif Jafri, Verification Consultant, Verilab One topic that is often overlooked is how does one end a test. One common approach has been to use pound delays or count the number of transactions generated. While this worked well for directed test environments this approach is not well suited for use with constrained random testbenches. Usually there are several threads running in parallel and to be able to intelligently tell whether all test criterions are met, we need a more centralized approach to manage and decide test completion....
Uncategorized
Interesting Trend: Nightowl Co-Working
Posted on 08/22/2010 - 20:16 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Jenna Wortham’s “Fraternity of the Wired Works in the Wee Hours” in the New York Times on July 25 highlighted an interesting new trend in co-working: the 10pm to 4am shift. Profiling the “New York Nightowls” (tagline “New York Nightowls is a late night co-working club for professionals”) she opens with: (hyperlinks added) After college, most people do their best to avoid having to pull any more all-nighters....
skmurphy, Tools for Startups
Picked Up And Moved Heavy Objects Without Getting Hurt
Posted on 08/20/2010 - 02:43 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
My first real job was as a furniture mover when I was 16. When it came time to put together a resume as I was graduating from college “picked up and moved heavy objects without getting hurt”  was the best description I could come up with. I came across a copy of that first resume over the weekend and tried to recapture my frame of mind when I wrote it....
Quotes, skmurphy
Compelling Demos
Posted on 08/20/2010 - 09:49 by Theresa Shafer from the site SKMurphy
Second Derivative’s Great Demo! seminar on September 15, 2010 helps frustrated sales, marketing and presales professionals and entrepreneurs improve their skills and gain dramatic results. Peter Cohan helps organizations like Keynote Systems and Phreesia put the “Wow!” into their demos to make them crisp, compelling and successful. “I believe everyone on the team will find that your training and demo workflow has been extremely effective – we are confident that we’ve closed business directly as a result of applying Great Demo! practices....
Events, tshafer
TLM and VMM – What is it all for?
Posted on 08/18/2010 - 15:26 by John Aynsley from the site Verification Martial Arts
  John Aynsley, CTO, Doulos Having discussed some of the technical details of the implementation of the TLM-2 standard in VMM 1.2 in previous posts, it is time to stand back and ask what it is all for, especially considering that VMM must now co-exist alongside UVM in some projects....
Uncategorized
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