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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
Matter
Business
Bubble
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" Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster. "
Eric Ries
Better
Products
Busy
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Need
People
Science
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career. "
Eric Ries
Career
Time
Now
" 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
Challenge
Failure
Mistakes
" 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
" 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
" 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
Fast
Small
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Eric Ries
Future
Research
Job
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities. "
Eric Ries
Superficial
Good
People
" 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