The Lean Startup

“What's really held up, like, a lot of the techniques and the specific tactics from Lean Startup are a little dated now. I mean, you know, Groupon is a case study. Like, it's old now. It came out in 2011. But I think the principles have held up really well, and…”

“I think fundamentally like using resources well is an eternal entrepreneurial virtue. So even the people that are overfunded, a lot of them run into trouble because now you don't have that that reality kind of barking at you all the time to make sure that you'…”

“He really describes also, like, a software engineer's mindset and how they get it wrong, where the solution is to build new features, where he really is introducing this, like, new way to build something”

“My critique of that would be that if you follow that methodology, you will probably end up building a dating app for middle schoolers, because that just seems to be like the lowest base take of what humans want to some degree.”

“Iterate and execute perfectly in lean startup mode, but if you're pursuing a small idea, you'll iterate to a local maximum.”

“The lean startup by Eric Ries talks about how you don't need to actually build anything. You can put a landing page, you can send traffic to it. And based on that, you know, you can figure out what to build. I don't think that works anymore. I think that it's …”

“Even if you do do customer discovery, it's really hard. It's really difficult. Customers will sometimes tell you things that aren't true or they'll say, yes, yes, we would buy that, and we would buy it for this much, but by the time you've actually built the t…”

“I think the book lean startup may have done more damage unintentionally to software than any other book.”

“The Lean Startup book actually launched in the year that we launched, it was like, 2012, and investors were quoting it at us, and like, telling us to launch as quickly as possible. We kind of ignored them because we knew what we wanted in the product, and we k…”

“That notion that you can kind of iterate towards a product or even a company or a business model, if you don't have a strong vision to start out with, your heart won't be in it.”

“That is what it's called when you change the strategy, but try to have Fidelity to the vision that we, it needs a name because we do it all the time.”

“We charge onto the field, and no other army ever came to charge us back. Like, it just, we won by default because the people who were doing it the old way didn't really like it or want, like, it was very few defenders of the old way. Like, very few people came…”

“It's a scientific theory, which means that, that whatever works is lean startup. So if someone comes up with something new and it works, we can't be threatened and upset about it. We have to adopt it.”

“Top misconceptions about lean startup. And it was like, number one, lean means cheap. So you're doing lean startup. It means you're not raising money. It's like, that's not true.”

“Lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and, you know, it, whatever. It's just like, I'm, I read it in somebody's book that, that they're li…”

“When I was a consumer of books, I hated it when authors would come out with a second edition that would destroy what was beautiful about the first edition, including the mistakes. Because like in their attempt to put disclaimers on everything and make everythi…”

“MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether the hypothesis is true or not?”

“Writing software is the fastest way to learn, but in my view, it actually rarely is. It can be, but it rare, it rarely is. So I think we've conflated progress. We've conflated like developing an MVP with progress or rapid progress. Those are two very, very dif…”

“A lot of the kind of lean startup thinking is actually just like iterate quickly, right? Like the agile just iterate quickly, quickly, quickly. There's not much about strategy. It's much about high volume, you know, of tests.”

“It's not about low cost. It's about efficient use of proceeds.”

“So people talk about lean startup for startups and then lean startup for the enterprise, which I think is really silly. I, you know, I understand why people do it, but it doesn't make sense to me.”

“Lean startup has created a neutral terrain where different functions can come together to do this, and I think there's just a natural resistance to doing a methodology from someone else's function.”

“And they eventually got to a place where they can show, they can iterate on this so quickly now, they can build a new version of that device every week. Used to take them three to six years to build a new model. Now they can do a new version every week.”

“I have a secret product managers, like a meetup group that I do for one of the big tech companies where we get together. It's secret. I can't name the group... Because they work in a company that has a real strong, non-invented here culture, and lean startup i…”

“What matters is that you have a precise and clear language that you can communicate with your coworkers about. I don't care if you use my language or somebody else's, as long as it has a rigorous foundation.”

“Lean startup stands for what works. So if I said something wrong, if we discover ourselves as a movement, we use our own scientific process to discover new things, they obsolete the old things, and we should always be getting better, and what we wrote five yea…”

“If you read the book, the vast majority of it, the bulk of it by weight is not about, you know, This jargon, but it's about the management system. It's about the innovation accounting. It's about the math that underlies this way of working.”

“So I think of Lean Startup and MVPs in particular as a way to demonstrate progress towards the vision to sustain that interest over time during the long flat part of the hockey stick when the vanity metrics are really low and there isn't Instantaneous, overnig…”

“Pinterest is like a great, in fact, Ben Subberman is actually on the record as saying, had I read the Lean Startup book, I never would have done Pinterest, because it took us four years to figure it, If we had, if he had known about the Lean Startup thing, he …”

“Not only is this the first book that I've read voraciously from cover to cover in a long, long time, but it's now outselling Zero to One and Lean Startup as pre-order.”

“I think this line, I think this famous quote from Reid Hoffman around, you know, you should be embarrassed by your first version, I think that also gets misinterpreted a lot, because it shouldn't be, you shouldn't be embarrassed by it from, Ah, you know, it sh…”

“I just feel like it tries to teach, because they have to sell more books, it tries to tell anyone they can be an entrepreneur if they have a blank canvas and some post-it notes, and everyone can't be an entrepreneur. It just doesn't work.”

“I, you know, that book left such a bad taste in my mouth because I feel like it teaches, it tells you like, hey, if you follow these little post-it notes and these diagrams, anybody can be an entrepreneur, which is total bullshit.”

“I think Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank is that, that, and Lean Startup by Eric Ries. They're kind of the same book. One is like condensed and one is much longer.”

“Yeah, I mean, the V, the, in MVP, viable. Like, that's the hard one, because how do you know what's viable? Maybe something, maybe what you think is your MVP is not, not quite viable. Like, it needs just a little bit more polish in order to be viable, and then…”