Quotes from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Reading is good, action is better.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“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, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“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, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“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, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“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, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“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, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“Failure is a prerequisite to learning.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

“After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

About the author

Popular quotes

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― Judy Blume, quote from Tiger Eyes

“And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day.”
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