skmurphy

After every Bootstrapper Breakfast® we E-mail all of the participants and ask them for “one thing you learned at the breakfast.” Georgi Dagnall left a nice comment after Steve Blank visited on Friday (I have added some links for context) Sean suggested that I read the book, Four Steps to the Epiphany written by Steve Blank. I took his advice and found it to be one of the most practical business books I had ever read. When I heard that Steve was going to be the speaker at this Bootstrappers Breakfast, I had to attend to hear him talk in this intimate venue.

We had a great Bootstrapper Breakfast® in February in Milpitas with Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, speaking very candidly about the challenges of Bootstrapping Central Desktop and some lessons learned. Bob Gerughty mentioned after the meeting that he had run into someone who remembered him from  a comment he made at a breakfast almost a year ago. Bob was a Treasurer and/or head of Taxation at Altera, NeoMagic, andP hoenix Technologie before he branched out to bootstrap his own firm.

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. + + + “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through.

In his introduction to his  interview with Fred Brooks, John Cook has another great passage. The shelf life of software development books is typically two or three years, maybe five or ten years for a “classic.” Frederick Brooks, however, wrote a book on software development in 1975 that remains a best-seller: The Mythical Man-Month.