Eric Ries Quotes

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

Innovation accounting

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.

exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.

managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution,

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.

we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning.

We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall.

As Cook says, "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem."4

Build-Measure-Learn

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.

If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once

Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.

Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.

This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.

In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

it's human nature to assume that when we see a mistake, it's due to defects in someone else's department, knowledge, or character,

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Product managers figure out what features are likely to please customers; product designers then figure out how those features should look and feel.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Don't be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.

Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.

This is a classic case of "achieving failure" - successfully executing a flawed plan.

Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up

Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."2

Validated learning

learn whether to pivot or persevere.

Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be managed.

A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.

We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.

I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical.

At its heart, a startup is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products.

The Lean Startup works only if we are able to build an organization as adaptable and fast as the challenges it faces. This

Startups don't starve; they drown." There

Building a startup is an exercise in institution building; thus, it necessarily involves management. This

Most of the time customers don't know what they want in advance.)

It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.

Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

Reading is good, action is better.

we think we can truly short-circuit the ramp by killing things that don't make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do.

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.

If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?