Rachel’s Blog

Steve Blank new ‘Lean Startup’ book not available as ebook

February 9th, 2012

Steve Blank is famous as part of the “Lean Startup” / “Customer
Development” idea of growing a business (and if you are in publishing
and don’t know about these concepts, google them and learn because
someone who does is about to eat your business…)

He was scheduled to start a new ‘Lean Launchpad’ course at Stanford
this month, available free over the Internet. But he’s postponed it
for two months to rewrite the course based on his new book “The
Startup Owner’s Manual”, available next month.

http: //steveblank.com/2012/02/09/two-giant-steps-forward-for-entrepreneurs

Almost every comment on his blog page says “Great! Want the new book!
Please can we have an ebook version?”

He is undoubtedly someone worth listening to; I’m really looking
forward to the course.

But I do find it slightly amusing that he didn’t do the “Customer
Development” about his own book

Would it *really* have been that hard to release both a physical book
and an ebook at the same time?

It looks as though he’s decided to self-publish, and is using Amazon
for payments. But not for publishing. Strange.

P.S. Why do I care? Because I want to buy the book and he’s just doubled the price for me here in the UK

Item(s) Subtotal: 	$39.95
Shipping & Handling: 	$32.90
Estimated Tax: 	$0.00
Order Total: 	$72.85

Tags: Business, Lean Startup, Steve Blank
Posted in Business, Lean Startup | 5 Comments »

Minor gotcha with Liza Daly’s fast_iter

February 1st, 2012

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-hiperfparse

This is a really useful article about “High-performance XML parsing in Python with lxml”.

But there’s one gotcha I’ve discovered with the fast_iter() method described therein. Can’t comment on that website without getting yet another developer ID, so I’ll describe the issue here and hope that Google picks it up.

The problem comes with nested tags with the same name.

For example:

<product> <data> <product>Some useful data</product> </data> </product>

As far as I can see, the internal “product” will be cleared before the external one is handled, leaving with you with an empty tag.

Posted in Python | No Comments »

Stop Telling Everyone To Do Startups – Tell Them to Not Do It!

December 14th, 2011

As a woman who has run a startup, I’m confused by the furore about Penelope Trunk’s article “Stop Telling Women To Do Startups”.

I’d encourage anyone to think about working for themselves; I’ve found it on the whole more fun and better paid than working for others, you certainly have a closer idea of when your employer (= you) is going to run out of money and stop paying you…

But running a startup? When I founded my first startup in 1995, I’d always say to anyone who was thinking about starting their own – “Don’t Do It”. On the basis that if anyone was put off by that minor pushback, they’d never be able to stand the real pressure of actually doing it!

So the idea of telling anyone – woman, man, whatever – that they *should* be doing a startup… Well, that seems to me like something that would only be said by someone with a vested interest; or from someone who had no idea what they were talking about and therefore should not be talking.

Rachel

P.S. The original article from Penelope Trunk had a different title “Investors fund mostly men, which is fine for women”. TechCrunch seem to have added their own title to the same article.

Here’s the links:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/12/11/men-are-getting-all-the-vc-funding-and-thats-fine/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/11/stop-telling-women-to-do-startups/

Posted in Op-Ed | No Comments »