Eric Ries Quotes

We had gotten really good at optimizing, tuning, and iterating, but in the process we had lost sight of the purpose of those activities: testing a clear hypothesis in the service of the company’s vision. Instead, we were chasing growth, revenue, and profits wherever we could find them.

Os guardiões atrasam o trabalho de outras áreas funcionais por meio de avaliações, burocracia e regras rígidas. Áreas funcionais facilitadoras ajudam as equipes a acelerar seu trabalho.

This is an old direct marketing technique in which customers are given the opportunity to preorder a product that has not yet been built. A smoke test measures only one thing: whether customers are interested in trying a product. By itself, this is insufficient to validate an entire growth model. Nonetheless, it can be very useful to get feedback on this assumption before committing more money and other resources to the product.

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

what it does is develop entrepreneurs, because when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians.

People are accustomed to thinking of accounting as dry and boring, a necessary evil used primarily to prepare financial reports and survive audits, but that is because accounting is something that has become taken for granted.

We have the capacity to build almost anything we can imagine. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This

The Lean Startup takes its name from the lean manufacturing revolution that Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are credited with developing at Toyota. Lean thinking is radically altering the way supply chains and production systems are run. Among its tenets are drawing on the knowledge and creativity of individual workers, the shrinking of batch sizes, just-in-time production and inventory control, and an acceleration of cycle times. It taught the world the difference between value-creating activities and waste and showed how to build quality into products from the inside out.

Una startup es una institución humana diseñada para crear un nuevo producto o servicio bajo condiciones de incertidumbre extrema.

At its heart, a startup is a catalyst that transforms ideas into products.

It goes against the grain of what people have been taught in business and what leaders have been taught. The problem isn’t with the teams or the entrepreneurs. They love the chance to quickly get their baby out into the market. They love the chance to have the customer vote instead of the suits voting. The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers. There are many business leaders who have been successful because of analysis. They think they’re analysts, and their job is to do great planning and analyzing and have a plan.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

Innovation accounting begins by turning the leap-of-faith assumptions discussed in Chapter 5 into a quantitative financial model. Every business plan has some kind of model associated with it, even if it’s written on the back of a napkin. That model provides assumptions about what the business will look like at a successful point in the future.

Departments too often spend their energy learning how to use data to get what they want rather than as genuine feedback to guide their future actions.