Money Quote:

Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society.

Buried in this WaPo puff piece about Neel Kashkari is this gem:

In Washington, he used his BlackBerry to determine the bailout sum presented to Congress. His arithmetic: “We have $11 trillion residential mortgages, $3 trillion commercial mortgages. Total $14 trillion. Five percent of that is $700 billion. A nice round number.”

Looking back, he says, he is more confident about the two-by-sixes.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

As a CEO, another critical issue is to ask if there has been a major change – to either our underlying assumptions or to the external environment. Many of these changes go hidden but still impact what and how we do things.

In a startup the role of Customer Development is to:

1. test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem
2. test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem

Now I get it.

So, when that red-eyed “techie” comes out of a dark, dank lab/cube at 3am, with the shiny new orgasmatron, trash the condescending attitude and know that, as a marketeer/sales guy you have a golden, orgasmatronic opportunity at your fingertips. For your sake and hers/his, don’t screw it up.

Like Dave, I’ve split my professional life between engineering and marketing, and my observations parallel his.

I do note, however his taking the engineering side: “trash the condescending attitude and know that, as a marketeer/sales guy you have a golden, orgasmatronic opportunity at your fingertips”. The truly successful entrepreneurs know that each functional area and person is critical to the success of the product/service and the company. To discount any one group spells doom.

Yes, marketers must show respect for the “red-eyed techie”. By the same token, the engineer has to show respect for the marketer. The product doesn’t get to the customer all on its own, and the company doesn’t get paid without the effort of many different skills (embodied in many people with many roles) all working in concert.