Eric Ries Quotes

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.

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.

People are starting companies at young ages. They fail fast, learn a lot, and keep going.

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

I've had an entrepreneurial mindset from a young age and I've been interested in companies and products that are a little bit different.

Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch. This valley is loaded to the gills with a whole lot of totally insane people who honest to God believe that they can be the next Bill Gates or the next Scott McNealy. And that is genuinely stupid.

When I was starting out, being a young entrepreneur was not fashionable. Parents would ask, 'When are you going to get a real job?'

If the spirit of business adventure is dulled, this country will cease to hold the foremost position in the world.

Entrepreneurship is a life idea, not a strictly business one; a global idea, not a strictly American one.

We used to write this down by saying, 'move fast and break things.' And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

People try new things all the time. By now, the people who succeed have to be very sophisticated.

The show, like everything we have done and still do, is just one more experiment.

At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for 'yes.'

It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.

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

I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I'm 'bored'. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas.

The only reason you should be an entrepreneur is because that's the only way the idea will come into the world.

If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company.

On Startups: "I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.

If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.