Stewart Butterfield Quotes

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.

To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.

There are two different types of prototyping. First, the gut sense. You know how far you can take it. Second, you need experts to figure out whether or not it is attainable.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.

You launch a site, and you see what works, and you continue to make it better.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.

I kind of 'code-sketch,' where I get started with a project by actually writing the code for it and getting something up on the screen. Then I play around with it and see if it's any fun and change the parts that aren't.

We learn by taking action and seeing whether it works or not.

I'm a great believer in the principle of try it and work it out. If a gadget is designed well, you can easily work out how to use it. But if you can't, it isn't shameful to read the instructions.

You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

There are major benefits to building a game once and improving it over a long period of time based on user feedback and behavior. It's kind of depressing to have to build a game once, take all the user feedback, and then spend the next 3 years building another game.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

Prototyping is the conversation you have with your ideas.

Do it. Try it. Fix it.

When you feel you have good although incomplete expertise, start trying things. If it's not working, try something else; maintain an experimental mindset.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.