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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal
Last month on an east coast college tour with my daughter, I found myself in North Carolina for the first time in nearly 24 years. I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling...
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Ardent 2: Get Out of My Building
Some of the most important business lessons are learned in the most unlikely ways. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss. Not a...
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Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn
As VP of Marketing at our new startup, the CEO literally threw me out of the building and told me not to return until I understood the market and could identify the key applications and customers for...
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Ardent War Story 4: You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They...
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research...
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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers
At Ardent we were building personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) While the last post was titled “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer...
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Ardent War Story 6: Listen more, talk less
At Ardent we assembled an amazing group of talented engineers to build personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) The company failed. Getting Out of the Building...
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Relentless – The Difference Between Motion And Action
Never mistake motion for action. -Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. But few realize how this differs from most of the population....
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Closure
For those that know me, I’m kind of a “life is too short” kind of guy. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back. However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was...
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Strategy is Not a To Do List
I had breakfast with two of my ex-students from Singapore who were building a really interesting startup. They were deep into Customer Discovery and presented a ton of customer data on the validity of...
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