Eric Ries Quotes

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Eric Ries

Profession : Businessman

Birth : September 22, 1979

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

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

Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.

Eric Ries

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

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

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

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.

Eric Ries

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.

Eric Ries

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

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.

Eric Ries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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