Eric Ries Quotes

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

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

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

I'm an engineer turned entrepreneur who's passionate about connection.

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.

I'll be a mentor to those who want to create a business, product or service and aren't exactly sure how to do that. To me, it's a true sign of success if I can help someone have a better time of it.

If you're positioned to start your own organization, that's great - but rare.

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground.

The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

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

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

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.

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.

It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

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.

Mostly what I'm focused on is finding people who are younger who haven't built companies before but have a good idea.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

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

My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.

Don't be scared to try new things, but remember to hold on to the vision of your company and the initial successes that defined your brand.

My drive into high tech doesn't involve a lot of people - just me and a very small team.

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.