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" As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission. "

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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

World

People

" 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. "

" Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right. "

" 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

Same

Through

" 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. "

" The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued. "

" 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. "

" Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy. "

" The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource - the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you'll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I bet the people who are in the auto industry right now have more than 10,000 good ideas about what might work and what we need to do is not come up with more good ideas. We need to go and test as many of those good ideas as possible. "

" Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building. "

" Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success. "

" 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. "

" Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it. "

" You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system. "