Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Ask
You
Simple
" 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
" 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
" 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
Reality
Thinking
Ideas
" 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
" I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career. "
Eric Ries
Career
Time
Now
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad. "
Eric Ries
Numbers
Feel
Bad
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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