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The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Historical
Moment
Bigs
Places
Moments
Built
Imaginations
Time
Depends
Collectives
Question
Collective
Imagination
Unusual
Quality
Prosperity
Future

More quotes by Eric Ries

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Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
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Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
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Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.
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All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
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If your goal is to make money, becoming an entrepreneur is a sucker's bet. Sure, some entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but if you calculate the amount of stress-inducing work and time it takes and multiply that by the low likelihood of success and eventual payoff, it is not a great way to get rich.
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If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
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The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.
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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
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Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
Eric Ries
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New Customers come from the action of past customers
Eric Ries
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There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors.
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The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
Eric Ries
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What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
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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.
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Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
Eric Ries
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Reading is good, action is better.
Eric Ries
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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
Eric Ries
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Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries