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" 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. "
Eric Ries
Place
Building
Right Time
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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
Model
Wrong
Money
" 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
" Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance. "
Eric Ries
Family
Good
Health
" 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
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Need
Work
Test
" 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
" 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
Kind
Need
You
" 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
Food
Good
Time
" 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
Moment
College
Money
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Yourself
Believe
Business
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
Reality
Testing
Speed
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Loss
Odds
Policy
" 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
" I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career. "
Eric Ries
Career
Time
Now
" Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster. "
Eric Ries
Better
Products
Busy
" 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
" 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
" 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
You
Start
Mistake
" 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
" 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
Me
Simple
Myself
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Problem
Creation
Working
" 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
Good
Time
Success