169 Quotes by Eric Ries

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly – much too fast by traditional standards – shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day.

Thus, the right way to think about the product development process in a Lean Startup is that it is responding to pull requests in the form of experiments that need to be run.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build – the thing customers want and will pay for – as quickly as possible.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

When in doubt, simplify.

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.

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.

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.