Famous Quotes & Sayings

Eric Ries Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Eric Ries.

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Famous Quotes By Eric Ries

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What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? — Eric Ries

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Innovation accounting — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad. — Eric Ries

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The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once — Eric Ries

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I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process. — Eric Ries

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Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know. — Eric Ries

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We must avoid the caricature that science means formula or a lack of humanity in work. In fact, science is one of humanity's most creative pursuits. I believe that applying it to entrepreneurship will unlock a vast storehouse of human potential. — Eric Ries

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Building a startup is an exercise in institution building; thus, it necessarily involves management. This — Eric Ries

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Product managers figure out what features are likely to please customers; product designers then figure out how those features should look and feel. — Eric Ries

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Dropbox needed to test its leap-of-faith question: if we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try? They believed - rightly, as it turned out - that file synchronization was a problem that most people didn't know they had. Once you experience the solution, you can't imagine how you ever lived without it. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities. — Eric Ries

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Don't be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product. — Eric Ries

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Most of the time customers don't know what they want in advance.) — Eric Ries

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In School of One, students have daily "playlists" of their learning tasks that are attuned to each student's learning needs, based on that student's readiness and learning style. For example, Julia is way ahead of grade level in math and learns best in small groups, so her playlist might include three or four videos matched to her aptitude level, a thirty-minute one-on-one tutoring session with her teacher, and a small group activity in which she works on a math puzzle with three peers at similar aptitude levels. There are assessments built into each activity so that data can be fed back to the teacher to choose appropriate tasks for the next playlist. — Eric Ries

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At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company. — Eric Ries

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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it? — Eric Ries

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Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."2 — Eric Ries

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A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan. — Eric Ries

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When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake. — Eric Ries

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Validated learning — Eric Ries

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The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard. — Eric Ries

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The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. — Eric Ries

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The tremendous success of general management over the last century has provided unprecedented material abundance, but those management principles are ill suited to handle the chaos and uncertainty that startups must face. — Eric Ries

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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is. — Eric Ries

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A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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learn whether to pivot or persevere. — Eric Ries

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we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. — Eric Ries

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we think we can truly short-circuit the ramp by killing things that don't make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do. — Eric Ries

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You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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This is a classic case of "achieving failure" - successfully executing a flawed plan. — Eric Ries

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For one thing, everyone would insist that assumptions be stated explicitly and tested rigorously not as a stalling tactic or a form of make-work but out of a genuine desire to discover the truth that underlies every project's vision. — Eric Ries

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The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure. — Eric Ries

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There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years. — Eric Ries

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The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time. — Eric Ries

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

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I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions. — Eric Ries

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Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor. — Eric Ries

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managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution, — Eric Ries

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Platform Pivot A platform pivot refers to a change from an application to a platform or vice versa. Most commonly, startups that aspire to create a new platform begin life by selling a single application, the so-called killer app, for their platform. Only later does the platform emerge as a vehicle for third parties to leverage as a way to create their own related products. — Eric Ries

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Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal. This may take many attempts. After the startup has made all the micro changes and product optimizations it can to move its baseline toward the ideal, the company reaches a decision point. That is the third step: pivot or persevere. — Eric Ries

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I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort. — Eric Ries

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To open up a new business that is an exact clone of an existing business all the way down to the business model, pricing, target customer, and product may be an attractive economic investment, but it is not a startup because its success depends only on execution - so much so that this success can be modeled with high accuracy. — Eric Ries

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Reading is good, action is better. — Eric Ries

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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. — Eric Ries

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For example, in one early experiment, we changed our entire website, home page, and product registration flow to replace "avatar chat" with "3D instant messaging." New customers were split automatically between these two versions of the site; half saw one, and half saw the other. We were able to measure the difference in behavior between the two groups. — Eric Ries

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exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. — Eric Ries

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The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists. — Eric Ries

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One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an "island of freedom" where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five. What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit's senior management. — Eric Ries

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When I meet with most entrepreneurial teams, I ask them a simple question: How do you know that you're making progress? Most of them really can't answer that question. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn. — Eric Ries

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All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team's ability to learn in order to work more "efficiently. — Eric Ries

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In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today's dynamic, lean economy, it's more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth. — Eric Ries

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achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere. — Eric Ries

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Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst. — Eric Ries

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the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before. — Eric Ries

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We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build. — Eric Ries

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In the industrial world we have the problem of having more productive capacity than we know what to do with. That's at the root of the unemployment crisis: we've got so productive at making things, we don't require people to be involved in making the basics of life any more. Or nearly as many people. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted. — Eric Ries

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When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or - heaven forbid - meetings, I felt bad. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up — Eric Ries

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I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers. — Eric Ries

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It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing ... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. — Eric Ries

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Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn't mean it cannot be managed. — Eric Ries

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Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty. — Eric Ries

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Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs. — Eric Ries

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Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't. — Eric Ries

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Build-Measure-Learn — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated. — Eric Ries

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Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works. — Eric Ries

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As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek. — Eric Ries

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We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall. — Eric Ries

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In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown. — Eric Ries

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...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers. — Eric Ries

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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. — Eric Ries

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The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else. — Eric Ries

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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. — Eric Ries

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I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash. — Eric Ries

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When we're in the shower, when we're thinking about our idea - boy, does it sound brilliant. But the reality is that most of our ideas are actually terrible. — Eric Ries

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Some people are natural inventors who prefer to work without the pressure and expectations of the later business phases. Others are ambitious and see innovation as a path toward senior management. Still others are particularly skilled at the management of running an established business, outsourcing, and bolstering efficiencies and wringing out cost reductions. People should be allowed to find the kinds of jobs that suit them best. — Eric Ries

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

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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. — Eric Ries

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The Lean Startup works only if we are able to build an organization as adaptable and fast as the challenges it faces. This — Eric Ries

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Startups don't starve; they drown." There — Eric Ries