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A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Way
Winning
Unlikely
Time
Anyone
Rarely
Start
Provide
Learn
Customers
Away
Faster
Else
Spent
Matter
Large
Stealth
Enough
Head
Mode

More quotes by Eric Ries

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The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.
Eric Ries
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Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.
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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
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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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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
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I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.
Eric Ries
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Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y,' so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
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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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A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
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As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission.
Eric Ries
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Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.
Eric Ries
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We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Eric Ries
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Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.
Eric Ries
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A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
Eric Ries
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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.
Eric Ries
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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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
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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
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.
Eric Ries