Bringing order to the unruly world of early stage entrepreneurship
This article originally appeared in the Venture Capital Journal, a Thomson Reuters publication.
Eric Ries, author of the “The Lean Startup”, offers a worthy attempt to bring the scientific method to the often intuitive exploration of young companies.
What leads most startups astray is the lack of a disciplined, empirical procedure for making decisions, says Ries, who also writes on the blog Startup Lessons Learned and is a 2010-11 entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School.
Ries is by equal measure upbeat and cautionary. He sees a worldwide renaissance of entrepreneurialism, but worries about wasted, misguided efforts.
Venture investors take heart. He has an answer, which he details in the October 2011 issue of Venture Capital Journal.
“The nice thing about relying on human judgment and using the scientific method is (we develop) a system for training judgment to get better over time,” he told VCJ Senior Editor Mark Boslet. “We will eventually start to develop better entrepreneurial instincts.”
VCJ subscribers can read the full story here, which we’re posting ahead of the October publishing date.
“Lean Startup” evangelist Eric Ries is just getting started
– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
“Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time,” Eric Reis told me. “If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.”
Ries speaks with confidence, likely because people seem to listen. In fact, he’s become one of Silicon Valley’s best salesmen, largely by preaching what seems to be common sense: in order to maximize resources, companies need to find out what customers want as quickly as possible and capitalize on those findings.
Just one indicator of Ries’s power: entrepreneurs from 100 countries watched his sold-out, second-annual “Startup Lessons Learned” conference streamed live recently from San Francisco. (Its aim? “To unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup,” said Ries.) Another indicator: Ries’s new book, “The Lean Startup”, doesn’t come out until September, but is already the 11th-most popular book in the business and investing section of Amazon.
Ries, 32, never expected he would make his mark as a tech evangelist. A Yale grad who studied computer science, he began his career as an entrepreneur while still in school. (He now calls his short-lived startup, Catalyst Recruiting, “a footnote to a footnote.”) But even then he found himself “considered not only an expert in programming but in startups” by local incubators and two venture firms who asked him to be an adviser.
He’s quick to note the absurdity of the situation. “We spent all (of Catalyst’s) money on marketing, thinking there would always be more. Based on what I was reading in magazines at the time, I thought the rules for entrepreneurship meant being at the right place at the right time, working hard, breaking all the rules, having great perseverance, then pounding the keyboard some more and having a beer.”
A broader network of people began listening to Ries in 2008, after he began espousing lessons he’d learned as the CTO and co-founder of the 3D virtual world IMVU. Many of those lessons centered on figuring out what works as quickly as possible through constant iteration and customer feedback. (IMVU, which Ries left four years after its 2004 founding, used to toss fresh code into its production cycle 50 times a day, he said.)
Top 5 myths about the lean startup
- Eric Ries is a serial entrepreneur and author of the entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. The original version of this blog was posted here. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail.
Why? They built something that nobody wanted. That sounds like a beginner’s mistake, but in the conditions of extreme uncertainty under which entrepreneurs operate, it’s challenging to innovate and find a market, to take risks and mitigate risk.
Almost two years ago, I left my operating role as the co-founder of a startup, out of an interest to help the entrepreneurship industry develop a more effective, data-driven way of building companies. During that time, I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world and created a methodology for innovation now known as The Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled. As with any new idea, with popularity comes misinterpretation.
Here are the top five myths about The Lean Startup, and the truth behind each misconception:
Myth 1: Lean means cheap. Lean startups try to spend as little money as possible.
One more myth to add-Lean startups rely on feedback from surveys,questionnaires and analytics to make informed decisions on their assumptions about customer development. This is a good start, getting out from behind you computer and talking to real people will reward you with unresolved problems you may not of thought of to help you get to a product-market fit sooner.
Brian Mcfarlane
http://www.productlaunches.co
