Eric Ries Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.

Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

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

Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.

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.

Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.

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.

If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

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.

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.

The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.

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.

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

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

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.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

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.