Eric Ries Quotes

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

Entrepreneurs … benefit greatly from being willing to fail, willing to experiment. Good entrepreneurs tend to be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details. They’re persistent on what they’re trying to accomplish, but they are willing to rewrite the details as needed as they learn and as things fail.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

Not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody wants to create a little piece of the American dream, the Silicon Valley version. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Vinod Khosla is best known for shunning convention and taking massive risks on companies he calls 'black swans' -companies with a near-complete chance of failure. But, if they succeed, the world will be forever changed.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

A business model that hasn't been tried before is always interesting, even if it's likely to fail.

Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

There's an energy and excitement when you're building a company. You have so much tail wind. You're planting new seeds. But it's also scary, because there's no safety net.

Starting a company, your success is going to be very dependent on how you adapt. You're going to make decisions, you're going to make bets; most of them are going to turn out to be wrong.

It is human nature, especially as we get older, to look for stability in our lives. But if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to fight against that somewhat, as starting a business requires movement. You cannot stay still.

From the time I was a kid, I was always interested in any and all kinds of new business ideas.

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

For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.

Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.

What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.

There would really be no reason to get up in the morning if Founders Fund was not willing to invest in companies that were doing important things, great businesses that very few people believe in.