Notes:

This table compares two companies for which I worked as CTO. Both companies were first movers in their respective market categories. They charged about the same about of money, and at exit, they had about the same number of customers.

I had no experience in either market when I started. Indeed, both were pioneers so no one really had any experience. The CEOs were about the same age and had about the same experience in their respective markets.

The technology was the same. In the first case, it was a custom built server platform. In the second, it was web-based. But the deployment platform was not a critical factor in the customer decision making process, in the first or second cases.

It took me nine years to learn that I wasn't being effective at my job with the first company. As you'll see on the next slide, my approach to development was Waterfall, and was not in any way agile.