Top 100 Eric Ries Quotes
#1. Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
Eric Ries
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Eric Ries
#7. The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
Eric Ries
#8. 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
#9. The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
Eric Ries
#10. A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
Eric Ries
#11. 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
#12. In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.
Eric Ries
#13. 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
#14. At its heart, a startup is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products.
Eric Ries
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
Eric Ries
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Startups don't starve; they drown." There
Eric Ries
#21. A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
#22. 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
#23. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be managed.
Eric Ries
#24. The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once
Eric Ries
#25. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Eric Ries
#26. 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
#27. When we're in the shower, when we're thinking about our idea - boy, does it sound brilliant. But the reality is that most of our ideas are actually terrible.
Eric Ries
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
Eric Ries
#31. 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
#32. When I meet with most entrepreneurial teams, I ask them a simple question: How do you know that you're making progress? Most of them really can't answer that question.
Eric Ries
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.
Eric Ries
#37. In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.
Eric Ries
#38. 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
#39. Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
Eric Ries
#40. 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.
Eric Ries
#41. 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
#42. If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Eric Ries
#43. We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall.
Eric Ries
#44. 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
#45. By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.
Eric Ries
#46. Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
Eric Ries
#47. At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.
Eric Ries
#48. Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
Eric Ries
#49. A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty
Eric Ries
#50. This is a classic case of "achieving failure" - successfully executing a flawed plan.
Eric Ries
#52. exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
Eric Ries
#53. Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Eric Ries
#54. 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
#55. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
#57. Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries
#58. 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
#59. Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.
Eric Ries
#60. the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.
Eric Ries
#61. The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
#62. 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
#63. focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work.
Eric Ries
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource - the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.
Eric Ries
#68. The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Eric Ries
#69. The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Eric Ries
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
Eric Ries
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
Eric Ries
#77. 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
#78. The question is not "Can this product be built?" In the modern economy, almost any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?" To
Eric Ries
#79. 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
#80. 1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?
2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution for that problem?
Ries Eric
#81. I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.
Eric Ries
#82. 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
#83. learn whether to pivot or persevere.
Eric Ries
#84. Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up
Eric Ries
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.
Eric Ries
#88. Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
Eric Ries
#89. 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
#90. If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
Eric Ries
#91. managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution,
Eric Ries
#92. 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
#93. All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical.
Eric Ries
#94. 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
#95. Most of the time customers don't know what they want in advance.)
Eric Ries
#96. Reading is good, action is better.
Eric Ries
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
Eric Ries
#100. 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
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