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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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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Lessons
Failing
Learn
Cannot
Important
Scientific
Fail
Method

More quotes by Eric Ries

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In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
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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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The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
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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.
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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.
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All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
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There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and - most importantly - creating jobs.
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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.
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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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Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
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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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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
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Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
Eric Ries
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Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.
Eric Ries
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
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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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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.
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Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
Eric Ries