Quotes About Startup

Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history. And yet, do any of us feel that the world around us is getting more and more stable every day? Changing such a mind-set is hard but critical to startup success.

dot-com flameouts that erroneously believed that they could lose money on each customer but, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume.

As I can attest, anybody who fails in a startup can claim that he or she has learned a lot from the experience. They can tell a compelling story.

A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. It lays out a strategy that takes those assumptions as a given and proceeds to show how to achieve the company's vision. Because the assumptions haven't been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup's early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible.

All this time, David was learning and gaining feedback from his potential customers, but he was in an unsustainable situation. You can't pay staff with what you've learned,

Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere.

El objetivo de una startup es averiguar qué debe producirse, aquello que los consumidores quieren y por lo que pagarán, tan rápidamente como sea posible.

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

Principle five behind the Startup Way philosophy is continuous transformation: All of this requires the development of a new organizational capability: the ability to rewrite the organization's DNA in response to new and diverse challenges. It would be a shame to transform only once. When a company has figured out how to transform, it can - and should - be prepared to do it many more times in the future.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions.

The decision to pivot is emotionally charged for any startup and has to be addressed in a structured way. One way to mitigate this challenge is to schedule the meeting in advance. I recommend that every startup have a regular "pivot or persevere" meeting.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Internal startup teams require support from senior management to create these structures. 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. Each of these requirements is different from those of established company divisions.