Quotes About Startups

We created Engineer.ai so that everyone can build an idea without learning to code. ~ Engineer.ai CEO

The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. Nobody in the startup world could have such a mug, I mused; it would be ridiculous. My experience is full of situations where reality proved too unpredictable to avoid failure.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

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

Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup's vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy

I call the traditional numbers used to judge startups "vanity metrics," and innovation accounting requires us to avoid the temptation to use them.

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it's ready.

Startups don't starve; they drown." There

Startups do not yet know who their customer is or what their product should be.

As one of my mentors, the venture capital investor Shawn Carolan, put it, "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. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The

My goal in advocating a scientific approach to the creation of startups is to channel human creativity into its most productive form, and there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere. Companies

This line of thought evolved into the Lean

Grockit offers

Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.

Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management.

For startups, the role of strategy is to help figure out the right questions to ask.

Compared to a lot of startups, the Grockit team had a huge advantage: they were tremendously disciplined. A disciplined team may apply the wrong methodology but can shift gears quickly once it discovers its error. Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

When startups start to run low on cash, they can extend the runway two ways: by cutting costs or by raising additional funds. But when entrepreneurs cut costs indiscriminately, they are as liable to cut the costs that are allowing the company to get through its Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop as they are to cut waste. If the cuts result in a slowdown to this feedback loop, all they have accomplished is to help the startup go out of business more slowly.

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.