Silicon Flatirons is pleased to host Rally Software Chief Technology Officer, Zach Nies, for a Crash Course about some of the surprising science behind building successful startups. Even though building a startup is hard work with high failure risk, entrepreneurs Steve Blank and Eric Ries have popularized practices that can increase the odds of success. Following the Customer Development or Lean Startup practices will show you what to do. This talk will give you an understanding of why these techniques work, which will allow you to better apply them to your startup or scale them into your enterprise. The event will focus on high growth business based on the deep experience of a CTO from one of the Front Range’s leading companies. Entrepreneurs are by nature execution-oriented and you will walk away from the talk with concrete, actionable ideas that will help you make better decisions tomorrow. The subject matter should be relevant to both entrepreneurs creating new companies and entrepreneurs reinventing existing enterprises.
What You Will Learn:
- An understanding of the surprising science that can increase the odds of building a successful startup
- About why the Customer Development and Lean Startup models work
- How to improve decision making in environments of high uncertainty
- How to scale these models to your not-so-lean, not-so-startup company
- What has worked for other local startups
Speaker: Zach Nies, CTO, Rally Software
Zach Nies brings over 25 years of engineering, product development, and startup experience to Rally. Prior to joining Rally, Zach served as Principal Architect and Director of Systems Architecture for Level 3 Communications. Prior to Level 3, Zach was co-founder of a startup that used web technologies to change how creative professionals managed projects. His company was acquired by publicly-traded Creo, Inc. now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark, where he provided the overarching technological vision for the company. At the age of 13, Zach began commercially publishing software and, at age 16, started a successful consulting business. A Boettcher Scholar, Zach received his BS with distinction in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.