Eric Ries Quotes

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

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.

The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.

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.

Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan

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.

I'm a creature of startups. For example, I don't want government interference in the startup ecosystem.

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

It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies.

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.

Where the rules of the road are not there, then there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for entrepreneurs to bring in their innovation and their different way of thinking.

As an investor, I'm always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow's Twitter, Facebook, or Google?

Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.

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

I think there are too many start-ups and not enough real companies.

Without competition, Silicon Valley will stop taking risks and will stop innovating.

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there's the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let's call it the Jobs Narrative.

Great founders live for chaotic moments.

It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.

When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.

If you immediately take a job somewhere, you've given up on the dream of being an entrepreneur and creating jobs for people and making new technologies and making new paths.

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.

Be innovative. Don't listen to the tried and tested wisdom. Take a risk!

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.