Top 100 Eric Ries Quotes
#1. The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Eric Ries
#2. 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.
Eric Ries
#3. engineers agree to adapt the product to the business's constantly changing requirements but are not responsible for the quality of those business decisions.
Eric Ries
#4. Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
Eric Ries
#5. Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.
Eric Ries
#6. Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.
Eric Ries
#7. The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Eric Ries
#8. HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
Eric Ries
#9. Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.
Eric Ries
#11. focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.
Eric Ries
#12. Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
Eric Ries
#13. The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
#14. Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.
Eric Ries
#16. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#17. 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.
Eric Ries
#18. Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Eric Ries
#19. exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
Eric Ries
#20. When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.
Eric Ries
#21. 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.
Eric Ries
#22. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team's ability to learn in order to work more "efficiently.
Eric Ries
#23. As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
Eric Ries
#24. Reading is good, action is better.
Eric Ries
#25. Most of the time customers don't know what they want in advance.)
Eric Ries
#26. Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you'll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too.
Eric Ries
#27. All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical.
Eric Ries
#28. Product managers figure out what features are likely to please customers; product designers then figure out how those features should look and feel.
Eric Ries
#29. managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution,
Eric Ries
#30. If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
Eric Ries
#31. Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
Eric Ries
#32. achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.
Eric Ries
#33. The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.
Eric Ries
#34. 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
#35. Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up
Eric Ries
#36. learn whether to pivot or persevere.
Eric Ries
#37. For one thing, everyone would insist that assumptions be stated explicitly and tested rigorously not as a stalling tactic or a form of make-work but out of a genuine desire to discover the truth that underlies every project's vision.
Eric Ries
#38. I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.
Eric Ries
#39. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently.
Eric Ries
#40. 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.
Eric Ries
#41. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Eric Ries
#42. The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once
Eric Ries
#43. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be managed.
Eric Ries
#44. I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.
Eric Ries
#45. A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
#46. Startups don't starve; they drown." There
Eric Ries
#47. Fire that customer," I'd say to the person responsible for recruiting for our tests. "Find me someone in our target demographic." If the next customer was more positive, I would take it as confirmation that I was right in my targeting. If not, I'd fire another customer and try again.
Eric Ries
#48. The tremendous success of general management over the last century has provided unprecedented material abundance, but those management principles are ill suited to handle the chaos and uncertainty that startups must face.
Eric Ries
#49. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
Eric Ries
#50. It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.
Eric Ries
#51. A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
Eric Ries
#52. You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
Eric Ries
#53. 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.
Eric Ries
#54. 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.
Eric Ries
#55. The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
Eric Ries
#56. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Eric Ries
#57. Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor.
Eric Ries
#58. Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.
Eric Ries
#59. 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.
Eric Ries
#60. 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
#61. At its heart, a startup is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products.
Eric Ries
#62. This is a classic case of "achieving failure" - successfully executing a flawed plan.
Eric Ries
#63. A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty
Eric Ries
#64. Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
Eric Ries
#65. At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.
Eric Ries
#66. Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
Eric Ries
#67. By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.
Eric Ries
#68. Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.
Eric Ries
#69. We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall.
Eric Ries
#70. If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Eric Ries
#71. 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
#72. 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,
Eric Ries
#73. The Lean Startup works only if we are able to build an organization as adaptable and fast as the challenges it faces. This
Eric Ries
#74. In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.
Eric Ries
#75. there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.
Eric Ries
#76. When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or - heaven forbid - meetings, I felt bad.
Eric Ries
#77. 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
#78. When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.
Eric Ries
#79. You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
Eric Ries
#80. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
Eric Ries
#81. Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."2
Eric Ries
#82. 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
#83. If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
Eric Ries
#84. I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.
Eric Ries
#85. The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
Eric Ries
#86. Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
Eric Ries
#87. At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.
Eric Ries
#88. Don't be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.
Eric Ries
#89. 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.
Eric Ries
#90. If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#91. Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
Eric Ries
#92. 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?
Eric Ries
#93. We must avoid the caricature that science means formula or a lack of humanity in work. In fact, science is one of humanity's most creative pursuits. I believe that applying it to entrepreneurship will unlock a vast storehouse of human potential.
Eric Ries
#94. Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.
Eric Ries
#95. 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
#97. As Cook says, "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem."4
Eric Ries
#98. In the twenty-first century, we face a new set of problems that Taylor could not have imagined. Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our ability to know what to build. Although
Eric Ries
#99. Building a startup is an exercise in institution building; thus, it necessarily involves management. This
Eric Ries
#100. This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.
Eric Ries
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