Eric Ries Quotes

I can't say I'm not grateful to have journalists writing about me as a genius. But I know it's not true. I'm not confused. I understand that success comes through a lot of failure and a lot of very embarrassing failure. People want to create the next Facebook, but they are too afraid to create the next Facemash.

In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation.

It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.

If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be OK with failure. If you're not failing, you're likely not pushing yourself hard enough.

I actually believed if you work hard enough it was inevitable you'd succeed. Then I lived the 'Social Network' movie, but only the first half. The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.

I've always been an entrepreneur, but it's never been about the money. I like a challenge, the harder the better.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

Pure innovation is more gross than error.

If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.

My tendency is to be very experimental.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.

We don't grow unless we take risks. Any successful company is riddled with failures.

That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another.

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

In order to be creative you have to be allowed to fail.

Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem.

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

When I started Go Daddy, I tried many things - like building networks and selling education - and none of it panned out. I lost millions of dollars the first couple of years. I made a lot of wrong turns, but that's the process of being successful in business.