Quotes from Eric Ries

value in a startup is not the creation of stuff, but rather validated learning about how to build a sustainable business.

Traditional accounting judges new ventures by the same standards it uses for established companies, but these indications are not reliable predictors of a startup's future prospects.

good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

startup teams require three structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business, and a personal stake in the outcome.

Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop.

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner. I believe there are three reasons why this happens. First, vanity metrics can allow entrepreneurs to form false conclusions and live in their own private reality. This is particularly damaging to the decision to pivot because it robs teams of the belief that it is necessary to change.

All successful sales models depend on breaking down the monolithic view of organizations into the disparate people that make them up.

Second, when an entrepreneur has an unclear hypothesis, it's almost impossible to experience complete failure, and without failure there is usually no impetus to embark on the radical change a pivot requires.

Even when one is selling to large institutions, as in a business-to-business model, it helps to remember that those businesses are made up of individuals.

Wealthfront

Every setback is an opportunity for learning.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management. No, you didn't read that wrong.

Principle five behind the Startup Way philosophy is continuous transformation: All of this requires the development of a new organizational capability: the ability to rewrite the organization's DNA in response to new and diverse challenges. It would be a shame to transform only once. When a company has figured out how to transform, it can - and should - be prepared to do it many more times in the future.

Throughout the process of driving, you always have a clear idea of where you're going. If you're commuting to work, you don't give up because there's a detour in the road or you made a wrong turn. You remain thoroughly focused on getting to your destination.

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions.

Those who have sat in a meeting debating the units of measurement in a report will recognize this problem.

what it does is develop entrepreneurs, because when you have only one test, you don't have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you've got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you're running, then everybody's ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians.

We've discussed the telltale signs of the need to pivot: the decreasing effectiveness of product experiments and the general feeling that product development should be more productive. Whenever you see those symptoms, consider a pivot.

Successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plane right into the ground. Instead, they possess a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility.

Once a team is set up, what should it do? What process should it use? How should it be held accountable to performance milestones?

Compare two startups. The first company sets out with a clear baseline metric, a hypothesis about what will improve that metric, and a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis. The second team sits around debating what would improve the product, implements several of those changes at once, and celebrates if there is any positive increase in any of the numbers. Which startup is more likely to be doing effective work and achieving lasting results?

Departments too often spend their energy learning how to use data to get what they want rather than as genuine feedback to guide their future actions.

The decision to pivot is emotionally charged for any startup and has to be addressed in a structured way. One way to mitigate this challenge is to schedule the meeting in advance. I recommend that every startup have a regular "pivot or persevere" meeting.