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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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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Really
Steps
Measure
Sustainable
Learning
Organization
Outcome
Start
Build
Outcomes
Learn
Step
Dedicated
Process
Products
Extreme
Business
Follow
Uncertainty
Three
Creating
Experiments
Something
Conditions
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More quotes by 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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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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New Customers come from the action of past customers
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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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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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Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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