Quotes from Eric Ries

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.

If our production process is so fragile that you can break it on your very first day of work, shame on us for making it so easy to do so.

We must be willing to set aside our traditional professional standards to start the process of validated leaming as soon as possible. But once again, this does not mean operating in a sloppy or undisciplined wa

which of our efforts are value-creating and which are wasteful? This question is at the heart of the lean manufacturing revolution; it is the first question any lean manufacturing adherent is trained to ask. Learning to see waste and then systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries.

When one is choosing among the many assumptions in a business plan, it makes sense to test the riskiest assumptions first. If you can't find a way to mitigate these risks toward the ideal that is required for a sustainable business, there is no point in testing the others.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

At its heart, a startup is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don't care how the product is assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential part of the definition of a startup. I realized that as a startup, we needed a new definition of value.

Dropbox needed to test its leap-of-faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed—rightly, as it turned out—that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn't know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can't imagine how you ever lived without it.

I've come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by positive improvements in the startup's core metrics.

We had gotten really good at optimizing, tuning, and iterating, but in the process we had lost sight of the purpose of those activities: testing a clear hypothesis in the service of the company's vision. Instead, we were chasing growth, revenue, and profits wherever we could find them.

Once the baseline has been established, the startup can work toward the second learning milestone: tuning the engine. Every product development, marketing, or other initiative that a startup undertakes should be targeted at improving one of the drivers of its growth model.

To demonstrate validated learning, the design changes must improve the activation rate of new customers. If they do not, the new design should be judged a failure.

The Lean Startup adapts these ideas to the context of entrepreneurship, proposing that entrepreneurs judge their progress differently from the way other kinds of ventures do.

The bad news was that the hockey stick went up to only about $8,000 per month of revenue. These numbers were so low that we'd often have investors ask us, "What are the units on these charts? Are those numbers in thousands?" We'd have to reply, "No, sir, those are in ones.

I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally. None of these things are fun, but they also don't matter. What matters is that companies that don't continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don't believe in bet-the-company bets.

To open up a new business that is an exact clone of an existing business all the way down to the business model, pricing, target customer, and product may be an attractive economic investment, but it is not a startup because its success depends only on execution—so much so that this success can be modeled with high accuracy.

In fact, entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.

Startup productivity is not about cranking out more widgets or features. It is about aligning our efforts with a business and product that are working to create value and drive growth. In other words, successful pivots put us on a path toward growing a sustainable business.

old management methods are not up to the task. Planning and forecasting

That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or—heaven forbid—meetings, I felt bad. What did I really accomplish that day? Code and product features were tangible to me; I could see them, understand them, and show them off. Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly intangible.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty

Unfortunately, "learning" is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution. It's what managers fall back on when they fail to achieve the results we promised.

Building a startup is an exercise in institution building; thus, it necessarily involves management. This