Eric Ries Quotes

I came into the world at the same time as the auto, if you will.

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Over a 10-year period, 99 out of 100 new entrepreneurs will fail. Only one will be left standing as others get pushed out of the market or burn out from working so hard. It's really sad.

If you think about jeans or phones or television, we are used to new brands popping up right and left. But in the car industry, we grew up with Mercedes, BMW, General Motors, and Ford, and nobody can remember during his or her upbringing a new car brand coming to life.

I don't fret much about the natural life spans of shoe companies. If stores don't do the right things, they cease to exist, and that doesn't trouble me at all.

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

Sleeping at night is not a specialty of entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur who is sleeping soundly, something bad is happening to that person; they just don't know it's happening yet.

The deciding factor of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others fail is not limited to your DNA or your education; it is about the actions you take as the leader of your business.

I don't put Tesla in the Amazon category. They have not proved to me that, as a financial model and an economic model, it is going to work.

For over forty years, I've been one of the most passionate believers in entrepreneurs. From day one, I've learned that too many small businesses are predicated on business models that the owner barely understands, and then, those same men and women are baffled when their business dreams are overwhelmed with struggles they never foresaw.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

I believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine.

When Henry Ford founded the company bearing his name in 1903, he saw the car as a means of providing freedom of mobility to people around the world.

My original intent for investing into Sprint - the main strategy was to buy Sprint and T-Mobile at the same time, so we'd have a critical mass to fight against AT&T and Verizon. The U.S. government didn't accept that. They rejected it. So my fundamental strategy was broken.

Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.

Tesla Motor's original business plan had a copy of a letter from Nikola Tesla from the late 19th century talking about the challenges inherent in gasoline engines and the promise of the electric engine.

The automobile has moved into the mainstream of our integrated digital world.

When you get into investing, your default stance should be 'No,' because most deals suck. Most deals won't make money. Most companies will fail.

I know exactly what it feels like to be an entrepreneur with everything riding on a sale.

Starting a company is rough. It's even harder when you're young - I know this firsthand, because my first company flopped when I was 25.

Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching him fail from lack of nerve is tragic.

We've always loved the automobile, and we all love Henry Ford's original vision to open the highways to all mankind, the freedom and movement.