The best phrases from Eric Ries, the father of the Lean Startup

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He is a regular speaker at business meetings, advises startups, large companies and venture capital firms on business and product strategies, and collaborates with Harvard Business School.

His Lean Startup method has earned reviews in The New York Times, The WStreet Journal, Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs.

Ries has been chosen by Business Week magazine as one of the best technology entrepreneurs and is considered one of the most influential people on Twitter according to the Peer Index.

He was born in 1979 and in 2001 he settled in Silicon Valley where he worked as a software engineer. In 2004 he released IMVU, company that is dedicated to launching personalized avatars for its clients, with games and other series of services. Thanks to IMVU, Ries met Steve Blanka successful entrepreneur, who also became an investor in IMVU.

Blank insisted that Eric attend his entrepreneurship classes at the University of California, Berkeley. Eric was delighted by the methodology of Customer Development that Steve taught and quickly adopted it for his own company. Eric implemented quick and cheap experiments to see the results in his clients.

He tells in his book “The Lean StartUp” who often felt real shame when they launched some unfinished programs on the market, simply to test whether what they were doing fit with what their clients demanded. In 2006 IMVU raised $1 million in the first round of investment and was able to raise up to $18 million in subsequent rounds. IMVU has 40 million users worldwide and has a turnover of 40 million dollars. Today Eric has left the front line of IMVU and acts as a speaker and advisor to different startups.

We share some of his phrases to get closer to his way of thinking:

TOLearning to systematically see and eliminate waste has allowed lean companies like Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean Thinking defines value as ‘providing benefit to the customer’, everything else is waste.

When I meet with most business teams, I ask them a simple question: How do you know you’re making progress? Most of them really can’t answer that question.

I would say that, 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 conducting experiments, you can achieve more radically with less effort.

Our education 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’ or less guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that’s not how it works.

It is a very paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think of trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. He success It can be designed following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

You have the opportunity to develop a corporate culture after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. The process drives the culture, and not the other way around, so you can not only change the culture, you have to change the system.

Science and vision are not opposites or conflicts. They need each other. Sometimes I hear other startup people say something along the lines of: “If entrepreneurship is a science, then anyone could do it.” ‘I would like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.

The Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?