169 Quotes by 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.

Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.

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.

If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?

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.

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2.

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.

You can’t take learning to the bank; you can’t spend it or invest it.

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.