Reader Score
85%
85% of readers
recommend this book
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.
Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, and has had plenty of startup failures along the way. He is a frequent speaker at business events, has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy, and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.
"The Lean Startup has a kind of inexorable logic, and Ries' recommendations come as a bracing slap in the face to would-be tech moguls: Test your ideas before you bet the bank on them. Don't listen to what focus groups say; watch what your customers do. Start with a modest offering and build on the aspects of it that prove valuable. Expect to get it wrong, and stay flexible (and solvent) enough to try again and again until you get it right. It's a message that rings true to grizzled startup vets who got burned in the Great Bubble and to young filmgoers who left The Social Network with visions of young Zuckerberg dancing in their heads. It resonates with Web entrepreneurs blessed with worldwide reach and open source code. It's the perfect philosophy for an era of limited resources, when the noun optimism is necessarily preceded by the adjective cautious." --Wired
"I make all our managers read The Lean Startup." --Jeffery Immelt, CEO, General Electric
"Eric has created a science where previously there was only art. A must read for every serious entrepreneur--and every manager interested in innovation."
--Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Opsware Inc. and Netscape
"This book should be mandatory reading for entrepreneurs, and the same goes for managers who want better entrepreneurial instincts. Ries's book is loaded with fascinating stories--not to mention countless practical principles you'll dearly wish you'd known five years ago." --Dan Heath, co-author of Switch and Made to Stick
"Ries shows us how to cut through the fog of uncertainty that surrounds startups. His approach is rigorous; his prescriptions are practical and proven in the field. The Lean Startup will change the way we think about entrepreneurship. As startup success rates improve, it could do more to boost global economic growth than any management book written in years." --Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School
"The Lean Startup is the book whose lessons I want every entrepreneur to absorb and apply. I know of no better guide to improve the odds of a startup's success."
--Mitchell Kapor, Founder, Lotus Development Corp.
"At Asana, we've been lucky to benefit from Eric's advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business."
--Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and Asana
"Ries' splendid book is the essential template to understand the crucial leadership challenge of our time: initiating and managing growth!" --Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of the recently published, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership.
"The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question 'How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?'"
-- Tim O'Reilly, CEO O'Reilly Media