Quotes About Business

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup's present and future business prospects.

Contrary to traditional product development, which usually involves a long, thoughtful incubation period and strives for product perfection, the goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.

the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them.

cohort analysis,

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

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.

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

speed and quality are allies in the pursuit of the customer's long-term benefit.

The true measure of runway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy.

identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them.

What products do customers really want? How will our business grow? Who is our customer? Which customers should we listen to and which should we ignore? These are the questions that need answering as quickly as possible to maximize a startup's chances of success. That is what creates value for a startup.

It was time for a pivot or persevere meeting.

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 (see the chart on this page).

The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution. Startup teams should go through the Five Whys whenever they encounter any kind of failure, including technical faults, failures to achieve business results, or unexpected changes in customer behavior.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution