Grade A Entrepreneurs

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
What I like about long flights is that they enable me to read an entire book in one shot. This is how I read The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from Vonavona ventures (an advisory and consulting practice), published earlier this year.
This excellent book focuses on how social media have [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side [...]

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By Marylene Delphis @mddelphis
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits was published last July. It is a short sequel to a part of Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany (2005) and is prefaced by him. It starts with a truism that can’t be repeated enough, and that every single entrepreneur [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
From the science of automata to love stories with androids: Think about Wilhelm Schickard’s “calculating clock” in 1623 and, almost two hundred years later, of Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computer, the difference engine, and about the many inventions in between: Pascal’s Pascaline (1642), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner (1672), the dozens of mechanical calculators [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
We just celebrated thirty years of lectures in Stanford by French Academician Michel Serres (left with Robert Harrison on his right). The party was organized by Audrey Calefas-Strebelle at the residence of Brigitte et Jean-Louis Gassée in Palo Alto, and included very closed friends of Michel, celebrated philosopher (and also from the [...]

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