
Victory From Adversity - icey
http://steveblank.com/2010/01/11/victory-from-adversity/
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maxklein
That guy must have problems walking with balls of that size. That's so
courageous to walk into a guys office when you are just a startup without
funding and offer him a job. And he actually accepts. I could not do that. I
don't even KNOW people who could do that.

------
skmurphy
Key take-away from learning a prospect has already developed a competitive
version of your system:

"I left Silicon Graphics feelings discouraged. But on the drive back to
E.piphany a few things hit me.

o A credible customer told me that we had hit on a high-value problem

o They couldn’t find commercial software to solve this problem.

o It was an important enough problem that they invested effort to write their
own software.

o It had been deployed inside their company and there were real world users

o I could now point potential investors and visionary customers to the
widespread use of the product inside SGI as a proxy for our product

The more I thought about it, the better I felt. This was a validation of our
ideas not a negation."

------
jbellis
> Sixty days later we convinced Silicon Graphics to license us all of John’s
> code for a dollar.

!

~~~
angelbob
Presumably somebody at Silicon Graphics was willing to say, "yeah, we'll keep
using this code. But we're not in this business. We're not _going_ to be in
this business. We don't _want_ to be in this business."

Which is really, really awesome of them.

------
mark_l_watson
That was a great story :-)

I am just a 'pure techie' and could never pull off something like this, but I
enjoyed the experience vicariously. (All I can do is code ;-)

Off topic: SGI made such great boxes; I got to use their highest end reality
engines on three occasions, complements of SAIC, Nintendo, and Disney.

