Quotes About Learning

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

if you are asking, you're not there yet.

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

Toyota discovered that small batches made their factories more efficient. In contrast, in the Lean Startup the goal is not to produce more stuff efficiently. It is to-as quickly as possible-learn how to build a sustainable business.

Assumir a responsabilidade por esse fracasso é mais difícil no curto prazo, mas fracassar com honra é um dom,9 e permite aproveitar a lição mais importante do método científico: se você não pode fracassar, não pode aprender.

learning" is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution.

A transformação contínua – a capacidade de uma organização para testar e aprender com experiências relacionadas à sua própria estrutura e a seus processos, promovendo, por toda a empresa, as melhores técnicas comprovadas, limitando ou descartando o resto – é o que dará a essa organização a capacidade de prosperar na era moderna.

Most important, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

Every extra feature is a form of waste, and if we delay the test for these extra features, it comes with a tremendous potential cost in terms of learning and cycle time.

achieving failure"—successfully executing a flawed plan.

It is also the right way to think about productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we're getting for our efforts.

Es una de las lecciones más importantes del método científico: si no puedes fracasar, no puedes aprender.

As Cook says, "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem."4

How much time and energy should companies invest in infrastructure and planning early on in anticipation of success? Spend too much and you waste precious time that could have been spent learning. Spend too little and you may fail to take advantage of early success and cede market leadership to a fast follower.

Although lean production techniques are powerful, they are only a manifestation of a high-functioning organization that is committed to achieving maximum performance by employing the right measures of progress over the long term. Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop. But without this foundation, efforts to encourage learning, creativity, and innovation will fall flat—as many disillusioned directors of HR can attest.

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.

This is also common with pivots; it is not necessary to throw out everything that came before and start over. Instead, it's about repurposing what has been built and what has been learned to find a more positive direction.

Although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

It does not matter how fast we can build. It does not matter how fast we can measure. What matters is how fast we can get through the entire loop.

The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit. It also allows us to create learning milestones, which are an alternative to traditional business and product milestones. Learning milestones are useful for entrepreneurs as a way of assessing their progress accurately and objectively; they are also invaluable to managers and investors who must hold entrepreneurs accountable.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode—away from customers—is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

For a report to be considered actionable, it must demonstrate clear cause and effect. Otherwise, it is a vanity metric. The reports that Grockit's team began to use to judge their learning milestones made it extremely clear what actions would be necessary to replicate the results.

exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision.

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