I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development” (way ahead of its time). During the same period (1987 – 1990) and I did some work at MIT under Eric von Hippel on “user driven innovation with regard to software development” which today would probably fall under the heading of “open source software development approaches.”
In 2002 I became exposed to the idea of “agile software development” and subsequently was a first round investor in Rally Software which is now the market leader in Agile application lifecycle management software. Building on this, I’ve recently become fascinated with the notion of continuous deployment, a concept that has been popularized by Eric Ries and others.
I gave a talk at the fbFund Rev program about a month ago on the same day that Eric gave a talk. Since I was hanging around for the day, I listened to Eric’s talk, which was great. I mentioned it to David Cohen at TechStars who told me that he had been emailing with Eric about having Eric come to Boulder to do his thing.
Eric has decided to come to Boulder on 8/19 and 8/20 and give two talks. The first – on 8/19 – will be about The Lean Startup and will happen over dinner, followed by a moderated table discussion and then a final Q&A with Eric. Tickets include dinner with a discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students.
On 8/20, Eric will lead a half day in-depth workshop on the Lean Startup. This is a great chance to really go deep on some of the concepts behind building Lean Startups. A limited number of tickets are also available for this workshop. Early bird pricing expires on August 6th.
Eric has superb ideas around software development and lots of experience to back it up – it’s awesome that he’s coming to Boulder to share some of this with the community here.