Eric Ries

Entrepreneur

1978-09-22

Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur and author known for developing and popularizing the Lean Startup methodology. His book The Lean Startup influenced startup practice in technology and venture ecosystems worldwide. He has advised founders and organizations on innovation management.

Books by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup
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Secrets of Sand Hill Road
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The Startup Way
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Quotes by Eric Ries

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
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The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
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Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
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In my first start-up, I had an initial advertising budget of $5 per day total. That would buy us 100 clicks per day. At $5 per day, marketing people scoffed and said that is too small to matter. But if you think about it, to an engineer, 100 real humans everyday giving your product a try means you can really start improving.
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It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.
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The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
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HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
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Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
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A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
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Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.
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The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
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If your goal is to make money, becoming an entrepreneur is a sucker's bet. Sure, some entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but if you calculate the amount of stress-inducing work and time it takes and multiply that by the low likelihood of success and eventual payoff, it is not a great way to get rich.
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Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
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When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.
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There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors.
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There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and - most importantly - creating jobs.
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It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.
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Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.
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Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.
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At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.
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