- Jerry Kaplan
Jerry Kaplan is widely known in the
computer industry as aserial entrepreneur , executive, technical innovator, andauthor . Most recently, he was co-chairman ofEgghead.com , Inc. Previously, Mr. Kaplan served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of online auction company Onsale, Inc., which he co-founded in 1994.Prior to Onsale, he was co-founder and chairman of
GO Corporation , which developedPenPoint , a pen-based operating system. Mr. Kaplan wrote a best-selling book about his experiences at GO Corporation entitled "Startup--A Silicon Valley Adventure", published in May 1995 by Houghton-Mifflin.Before founding GO, Mr. Kaplan was the principal technologist at
Lotus Development Corporation, where he co-authoredLotus Agenda , the first personal information management software. In 1981, he co-founded Teknowledge, a public company specializing inartificial intelligence .Jerry is widely known for making hugely controversial statements about his ways of starting a company. Most of his remarks go against culture of lean startup, boot strapping and Product Focus. In his book he says that "The trick to establishing a new computer product is not to make it great, but to make everyone think it is going to be great before it's actually delivered." In a presentation at
Stanford he said that "One of the most common [mistakes that entrepreneurs make] is not raising enough money. ‘Oh, we can do it on the cheap, we don’t really need that much capital.’"Mr. Kaplan received a
Bachelor's degree inhistory andphilosophy of science from theUniversity of Chicago (1972), aDoctorate degree in computer and information science from theUniversity of Pennsylvania (1979), and was a research associate in Computer Science at Stanford from 1979 to 1981.External Links
[http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=368&author=22 Video of Jerry Kaplan at Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought leader seminar]
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0735101418 StartUp: A Silicon Valley Adventure: A Best selling Book Authored by Jerry Kaplan]
[http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=22 Stanford Profile page of Jerry Kaplan]
[http://slate.msn.com/id/2712/ Slate Article about Jerry and his ventures]
[http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2006/05/where_are_they_2.html Profile of Jerry Kaplan by Alarm Clock]
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