Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Trying
Success
Behind
Related Quotes:
" 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
More
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Support
Business
Family
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Day
People
Small
" 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
People
Wisdom
Vision
" 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
Perseverance
Work
Creative
" 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
Vision
Done
Time
" 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
Win
Commitment
Diversity
" 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
Work Hard
Failure
People
" Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy. "
Eric Ries
Vision
Testing
Right
" Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10. "
Eric Ries
Want
You
Need
" I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career. "
Eric Ries
Career
Time
Now
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Change
People
Culture
" 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. "
Eric Ries
People
Back
Fall
" The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled. "
Eric Ries
Significant
Movement
How
" 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
Small
Risks
World
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Try
Success
Perseverance
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Strategy
Famous
You
" 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
Failure
Me
People
" 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
More
World
People
" 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
Face
Hate
Success
" 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
People
Failure
World
" Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted. "
Eric Ries
Why
Nobody
Create
" 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
Matter
Business
Bubble
" Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad. "
Eric Ries
Numbers
Feel
Bad
" 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
Rich
Work
Time
" 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
Time
You
Trying
" 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
You
Action
Work
" 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
Thinking
Value
Customer
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Insurance
Limits
Serious
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Process
Decisions
Heart