Quotes About Risk

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

I call the riskiest elements of a startup's plan, the parts on which everything depends, leap-of-faith assumptions. The two most important assumptions are the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.

definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

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

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions.

I know for me, the MVP feels a little dangerous—in a good way—since I have always been such a perfectionist.

audacity of zero

These discussions of quality presuppose that the company already knows what attributes of the product the customer will perceive as worthwhile. In a startup, this is a risky assumption to make. Often we are not even sure who the customer is. Thus, for startups, I believe in the following quality principle: If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Startups are different: too much budget is as harmful as too little—as countless dot-com failures can attest—and startups are extremely sensitive to midcourse budgetary changes.

Third, entrepreneurs need a personal stake in the outcome of their creations.

The Lean Startup is a set of practices for helping entrepreneurs increase their odds of building a successful startup.

Entrepreneurship is management

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning.

Unfortunately, standard accounting is not helpful in evaluating entrepreneurs. Startups are too unpredictable for forecasts and milestones to be accurate.

MÁS ALLÁ DEL «SITIO JUSTO EN EL MOMENTO ADECUADO» Hay un grupo de emprendedores famosos que ganaron millones porque parecían estar en el sitio justo en el momento adecuado. Sin embargo, por cada emprendedor con éxito que estaba en el sitio justo en el momento adecuado, hay muchos que también estaban en ese sitio y en ese momento, pero fracasaron.

Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur

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.

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

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.

The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential.

Startups don't starve; they drown." There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins.

When in unknown territory, before you did anything else, make darn sure you look around to see if someone was about to blow your head off.