YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Ries

lines on the record: 157
first: 2023-10-29
most recent: 2023-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You have moral responsibility for the outcomes. And that's like a hotly debated point right now, but I feel like it's actually super, people have already made it clear in their rhetoric where they stand there. They're just trying to evade that responsibility. So the next gen of founders don't find this complicated at all. People feel a real sense of responsibility to make the world a better place, like really real things. Okay, great. So you're asking people, you know, like I was, you're like, I'm working on so many companies that are like straight out of science fiction. I mean, like a company that does, you know, travel from San Francisco to Tokyo in one hour. You're like, that's unbelievable. You know, actual weather changing, like the real thing where you're like, we're going to change the amount of habitable land on the planet and solve famine and drought forever. Obviously, AI, there's these just incredible possibilities. And, you know, in nanomaterials and quantum computing, I should go on. There's so many cool things going on. But they all have really dire consequences.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's one of the big, big, big issues that we're grappling with. Like if I compare the questions I get asked by founders today versus 10 years ago, like these issues are so much more in people's minds than they were back then. You know, and I often now, when I work with, when I meet, when I work with the founder for the first time, we'll often do a thought exercise that's kind of like, okay, we've talked about culture, we've talked about the company. It's like, okay, great. Why should anybody trust you? What do you mean? Like you're asking your, and companies are building, like we're talking about companies now building stuff that is so invasive into people's lives, like so much more powerful than it was before. And really, honestly, this is just about taking seriously the rhetoric about changing the world. In fact, so many tech companies, when they're raising money, are going to change the world in fundamental ways and when they're being asked to take moral responsibility or like, I'm just a little database. It's like, can't have it both ways, money. You like the superman who's reordering the whole world to your whim.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine a world in which everybody is required, and it's also, but it's also really easy to do, to define like a procurement policy. Like what am I interested in buying right now? What problems do I want to solve? What am I interested in buying? And what information do I want to have? And my agent reads my inbox for me with this filter and applies the filter completely fairly. Doesn't matter if I play golf with so-and-so last week or whatever. Just if the proposal comes in and it's credible and the AI is like really diligent about making sure it's not spam, like then it will bring the thing to my attention, but it won't show me the email. I won't be tricked by its clever. It could be terrible, but it could be really awesome.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To need AI generated email clients to read the email for them and summarize it for them. And someone was joking, we make jokes about like, I'm going to write three bullet points by AI, I will turn that into an email, send it to you. Your email will redact it back to the three bullet points. Couldn't we have just exchanged the three bullet points in the first place? We're like wasting a lot of silicon, you know, a lot of GPUs were burned to move these three bullet points from point A to point B. But I don't think that's as silly a story as it sounds. I actually am kind of excited about the possibility of AI powered marketplaces to be far more fair than the way we do it today. Because if you think about that story, the problem fundamentally is that you have a massive number of people who could create things for star owners. And if all of those people emailed every store owner on the planet every day what they could do, it would be an overwhelming amount of information. So neither side is really capable of doing that. But like AI is capable of doing that.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He would look in the email to see what he had pitched them and then talk to get the person on the phone. And it was like the things that it pitched were like so wildly creative and cool. It was like really interesting. They were in the tone of the store. They were like really like, they used clever puns. And so he was showing screenshots of the person writing back being like, you had me at, you know, it was very good sales prospecting. So, okay. So obviously like that's like an incredible story about experimentation at a super high rate, like just like nothing. We could never have done anything like that even five minutes ago and now it's going to become completely routine. But it's also a story about how all of our communication channels are about to be super saturated with AI generated experimentation, you know, like whether we wanted to or not. And so if you think, if you just extrapolate a little bit, if this technology holds the way we think it will, it's pretty clear that every company is going to be sending just huge volumes of AI generated email such that people are going to be able to...”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When GPT-4 was first launched, I saw a friend of a friend just was posting a friend of theirs, you know, like a story about someone who was using it for cold sales outbound right when it first came out. And they had downloaded a list of 10,000 Shopify stores with metadata, which I Googled, you can like buy that for like $100. And then they just told GPT for they roll a Python script for each store. GPT-4, please pitch this store owner something that my outsourcing company could build for them and be really creative about it. And then it just, he didn't even read the emails. He just sent them one after the other. And when the person would reply.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need companies who are committed to certain values. It changes the way that we think about these technologies in relation to ourselves as individuals. And that's really my goal in my work here is just like, how do we get people off the sidelines and into the fight, like doing things that are actually likely to be worthwhile? And as I'm talking to you, I'm like, oh, it sounds a lot like the idea that most of the work you do in a startup is going to be thrown away after you pivot. So don't do that work. It's like it's not really a special unique inside. It's just taking the same approach to coping with the uncertainty of entrepreneurship and now applying it much more broadly because everything's about to change.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The aperture of possible futures that AI makes possible is so incredibly wide. And like I said, predicting it requires a really deep understanding of a bunch of empirical questions as far as I can tell, nobody knows the answers to right now. So given that it's not knowable what's going to happen, like it's not just you don't, you're not an expert enough, but as far as I can tell, nobody knows. And the people who are most expert are actively doing the research to try to find out the thing that will help us predict. So you didn't think you could do about that. You got to wait for someone to go find that thing out. The thing that makes sense is to pick actions today that make ethical sense in a wide variety of future scenarios and do those. And what's really interesting is that takes people out of total paralysis about it into like, there's actually some very clear things that we should do. So like whatever your doomsday scenario is, we need more transparency right now. That's critically important. We need more state capacity. We need more confident leaders.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything I propose doing, someone's telling me that that's actually the evil thing to do and vice versa. So the other thing I think is really important is like big part of Lean Startup has been for me, it's been just about learning how to deal with uncertainty in my life. So like how do you deal from a business perspective? How do you deal with situations of high uncertainty? And you'd be scientific, you'd be experimental, how do we just like all these different values that are about coping with uncertainty? And so the question people are asking me is basically like, how do you take ethical action in the face of high uncertainty? And so the framework that I've been using I found very helpful and I hope other people will get something out of it is”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a very firm conviction about what's going to happen. And therefore, what needs to happen now to prevent something bad from happening? So you have the people who are like, we have to stop, pause, blow up the data centers because it's going to be this bad thing. People are like, we have to have government intervention to prevent research on the thing or to ban open source. But like for every one of the things somebody wants to do, somebody else is saying that is actually the thing that leads to the dystopian, right? Banning open source is what leads us into like a corporately controlled autocracy that's even worse than the thing that you were afraid of. So a very common question I've been getting from people in the industry who are having like an existential crisis about what should they do with their life in the face of this AI. And as you say, a lot of people whose startups are failing, like I want to be working on AI. Okay, for everyone who's got a grass is greener kind of attitude about that, the people that are actually like doing it and quitting their job and going to work on AI, the first thing they confront is like, what should I do that will have a positive effect? It's like, it's actually really difficult to find out.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Touch a lot of things. We need a lot of hierarchy because just the expansion factor of each one has this many reports, has this many reports as many reports. Like that's what's required in order for us to like summarize a large amount of information. If you have 100,000 employees there having 100,000 things, the CEO needs to know what's going on. That's really difficult. So there's this massive amount of human labor required just to summarize and understand what's happening. Well, AI is really good at summarization. It's actually one of its main strengths. So it's actually really easy in the not too distant future. It'll be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me everything my company is doing. And you won't need like tons of middle managers to do that for you. You'll just know. What we would like to build organizations where those kinds of powers are available to everybody. And I think the last thing is people are very focused on whether this is going to lead us to utopia or dystopia. And most people”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'll have a 30 day course. I was like, Yes, I know that, but could you please fill out the other 30 days? It was like no problem. And it spawned a new sub agent. It was like given these two as an example, please fill out the other 30 days. And it was like, got it. And it was like, how to do a task in 30 days? Well, first, look at these two tasks, then like create similar things for 28 more days, then return the results. It's like, no, no, I'm asking you to do that thing. If you ever watch the Monty Python, no, can't guard him if he's a guard skit. It's like that. You're just like, it's like we're talking past each other. So yeah, I think there's like, it's really interesting to see how AI as we learn to understand it, we will be able to develop different man. It will like really change management a lot because it changes the individual span of control quite a lot. It solves one of the most hard problems in management is that in order to”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agent, I wanted to write me a 30 day course or a 30 day course for teaching people lean startup. Someone had asked me to do that. And I was like, great, I'll have the AI do it for me. And it was amazing. It was like, okay, no problem. Day one, what does Lean Startup? How does it work? Day two, topic, you know, what does an MVP has to work? Dot, dot, dot. Continue like this for 30 more days”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You give it a task, like go take over the world or whatever, go make a real estate ice cream stand, or you give it any task you want, and it'll be like, whatever, these AIs are programmed to never say no. So whatever you say is like, no problem. It'll be okay. First step, write a business plan for taking over the world. And I'll spawn a new agent with a new AI. Okay, your job is to go write this business plan. And sometimes it'll go try to write the business plan. But oftentimes it'll like, it'll be like the subtask will be like, oh, first thing I need to do is spawn an AI agent that knows how to take over the world and have it write the business plan. And everyone will just pass the buck to somebody else or it'll be like, it'll go into an infinite regress. It's like, first thing we need to do is research this. And then like the thing that goes back now that we've learned to research that when you do research, 10 more things. And each of those 10 things require researching 10 more. It's like so many ways to go wrong. And anyone who's been a middle manager who reads these transcripts will be like, tell me about it, buddy. I know I once was doing a thing.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, please don't. I forget whose law. Anyway, that is going to be true on steroids in AI, where we're training in machine intelligence and we're transmitting values to it. Those are going to be our organizational values. And tech has severely underinvested and neglected in creating governance and alignment structures to have those values be explicitly embodied in the organization, which is why so many of our companies have become disappointments and so many people feel betrayed by the companies they themselves help build is actually kind of sad. So AI is going to force us to take those issues seriously no matter what. The other thing that's interesting you asked about how it affects lean startup. At the end of the day, AI is a management technology. The thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences. And if you watch people struggle to make AI agents work, it's been really interesting to me how often I've played with a lot of those tools myself. It's amazing how often you program the agent and it will be like, okay.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were entering into a really interesting phase of humanity and technology and civilization To know the right answers to those questions requires empirical knowledge that nobody has. That's what's exciting about it. And also, of course, some people find it terrifying. I think that what I'm seeing so far is that, first of all, people are afraid of AI, but they're not really afraid of AI. They're afraid of corporations with AI. Like AI doesn't do anything by itself. It has to be embodied and deployed by humans who have bad alignment. And so everyone's talking about AI alignment. I'd be a little more sanguine about AI alignment if the company's doing the aligning were better at aligning their human intelligences. Because, you know, I'm blanking on whose law it is. I don't always named laws. The idea that your software comes to reflect the organization that produces it is somebody's law, Conway's law, maybe.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like when you raise too much money and you got your cap tables all messed up and you're like, I feel like for our 2021 vintage brothers and sisters, sometimes you just. You need to try again with the right capital structure. It's not possible. Make the structural changes you actually have to make to give yourself a chance to do something you care about. If you don't have that, what are we doing here? Life's too precious for”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, wait, we all actually secretly want to do this other thing, but we all are afraid to let the others down. It's like, that's actually great new. Well, good. Don't mourn that 18 months of your life you just wasted. Be excited about the fact that you actually are on the same page about the new thing. Anyway, everyone says the new thing. See if one of them stands out to you. Do that one. If you all agree, do that one. If you have three things that you're equally excited about, do them in order. Everyone gets one month. We've got three months of runway left. Well, first month we'll do the first thing. Second month, and we'll just see if anything sticks. And then Sometimes people do that and they're like, I'm just exhausted. I just want to die. If everyone goes around and says, I just give the money back. It's okay. Don't die. Let the company die. It's all right.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a fixed period of time, everyone go around the room and say if I could start this company over again, the thing I wish we were doing was and no one wants to go first, but since everyone's going to have to do it, you're like, okay. I kind of wish we were doing this other thing. Why? Well, everyone say, I'm like, sometimes the first person goes and everyone's like, I've been wanting to say that same thing for months.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys, yes, it's up and to the right, but it's not what you need it to be for this to worry. It's just so trying to get yourself, so give yourself a fixed amount of time on the current thing if you have to, then if you can't, once you say, okay, that's not working, do we have enough time for something new? Could you give yourself six weeks to try the new thing? And it's like, you know, if you're a bigger company, like, okay, maybe you can't have a whole company work on it, but like, can we have a team or can we do something where we just somebody, at least one whole human being, not a part-time committee? Somebody is full-time heads down trying to make the new thing work on a deadline. And if you're a small team, there's only three of you, can you just put the old thing on pause for a minute and give yourself a fixed, if it was one weekend that would be better than nothing, any amount of what can you actually afford? If it was six weeks, but if it's only one weekend, like no problem. Whatever, like, what is the new thing you want to do? And just now that you've agreed among yourselves that you're going to do that.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic thing if you can't agree that it's not working, then okay, can we take six weeks to try to make it work? It's like we have this assumption. We're going to try to test it and we're going to like instead of working on the 29 other things that we have to do in the future, can we just spend all of our time 100% on the one and only one thing that matters right now and just like go heads down on that for a fixed period of time and see can we move is it possible to move the needle in that thing because one of the things that is true about startups when it's not working is that they're stuck in this kind of law of diminishing returns where like you just you can test yourself you can do everything you try doesn't work nothing works it's like Thomas Kuhn in his theory of scientific paradigms one of my favorite things that he talks about is like when an old paradigm is replaced with a new paradigm it's usually only because the old people die out and the new people replace them but he's”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the first thing: it's just can you admit it to yourself? Can you do it? Then it's like shut down. If you admit that it's not working, then like what do we do? And what I really ask people to do in these situations is like give yourself a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, if you're asking whether you should pivot or not, you probably know the answer already. That's the first thing to just straight up say, people call me sometimes, I want to know if I have product market. Well, the fact that you have time to call me and ask me this question already tells me the answer. If you had product market fit, you would not have time for this. There's no time for like when it's working. There's no time for navel gazing. There's no time for anger. If you've never lived through a company going through product market fit, it's such a rush. It's such an insane thing. The whirlwind of it is so amazing and so horrible at the same time. There's just no time for anything else. So if you're not sure, you're sure.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's not what it's like. It's really much more about having the courage to see the world as you think it ought to be. And then dance with that wherever it takes you. So, I think it's much more an element of courage than of intelligence or anything else.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has ever accused him of having a lack of vision, but somehow, like this is true, like, so I feel like part of this is about just admitting the complexity of these stories is a little bit more, there's more to the story than you really realize. These are imperfect people. And the pivot is really about like learning, right? That's to me like the thing that matters, you know, the original idea of the pivot was like one foot anchored in the thing, one other foot moving, like from basketball, right? So like anchored in what you've learned and yet so connected. So like if you was truly a complete shutdown, start over again. Nobody and nothing in common. I was like, that is not a pivot. But that's just actually quite rare. Usually there's some critical insight or element of the first thing that is carried over into the second thing. And if you were there, if you know the story, you'll be like, oh, wow, that makes sense in retrospect. And again, I think this cuts against our whole idea. Like the thing we think it's like to be a visionary is you just, you know, all the answers. You're like a biblical prophet who sees the future.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Zuck and D'Angelo had already moved on from Facebook and decided it wasn't successful enough. And they were like, I forget one of them was working on like a system where you could use gestural controls on your webcam to program computers because we wouldn't get carpal. They were sitting on Facebook and it was like the story, I think I shouldn't ask Dus if this is true. They believe Dustin Moscovic taught himself to program so that he could keep up with the demand of people who wanted to open Facebook at new schools because the virality was like so insane. And I was like, wow, you can be even building Facebook and not know. It's like people are like, well, if I told you that story without telling you the name of the foundry, you'd be like, that's no visionary. I'm like, no, it's.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes it blows up so much that you're like, wow, that's amazing. But oftentimes like the new thing will get like 100 signups. And if you'd started with that as your first thing, you would have been like, eh, 100 signups. But if you've done 20 things in a row with zero signups, man, you're like, God, somebody likes this thing. Sometimes you first try, sometimes not. And again, not to go back to Facebook all the time, but that's such a famous story that people know it in the movie, there's that famous scene where they live in the house in Palo Alto and they run into Sean Parker and he, you know, like that apparently that's real. And they really were living in that house. They really were working on faith. But like the thing that gets missed from the story is that Facebook's already started at that point. It's already being successful and they're on the break between semesters on the summer. And Dustin Moscovic and Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo and I forget who else are living in this house together. And I remember learning, someone told me this story about what they were actually working on at that time.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because our values were like, you can't build a game without this thing. And then this thing turns out to be more valuable than the game. And then you're like, oh, why are we building this game? This is the thing we actually really care about. So people are like, well, I thought your vision was to build a game. It was like, well, maybe. But why did they build that thing first? Other people build games without building that thing. So like that's why I say it's a process of self-discovery. Oftentimes the vision is discovered more than chosen in these stories. And from the outside, it can seem really, really weird. And part of it is also that some people really need the failure of the first thing to appreciate what is great about the second thing.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why it's so hard to evaluate from the outside because oftentimes there is a thread of connectivity from the inside makes sense why we went from this thing to that thing And it's often something unusual, like it'll be something like, well, while we were building the game, we had to do this thing first.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The physical evidence got to win out. But I think it's important also to understand how much that is true. That's like, again, go back to like why science is so important. Like, why do we write our, like all the elementary things about science, we write our hypotheses down, we subject our things to, like we do that because human psychology is so buggy. And people who are fighting with their generative AI chat bots and stuff are starting to see. Those are nothing but a reflection of human theory of mind. So like we're starting to see it in an alien creature that like, wow, our intelligence has all these weird behaviors and gaps and things. And of course, we want our robots to be perfect. But it's like, well, first look in the mirror and realize that you yourself carry all those cognitive biases and you got to put in place a structure to get around them or they're going to destroy you.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, that's not what I thought back then. I was on the other side. That's my co founder's bad idea. That's not my idea. And I had this realization that like, it's not just that I learn something through the building this company about strategy. My own understanding of the vision of what we were doing was different. But I don't, like the thing that's so critical to understand is I, even to this day, have no psychological memory of having changed my mind about it. I still have the original memory of writing those things on the whiteboard. And I really thought someone was playing a trick on me at first because what I could witness with my own eyes on the whiteboard contradicts my actual memory of the thing. And I was like, which of us is right? And of course, I had to admit.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then years later, we moved offices again, and someone was cleaning out an old storage closet, and that whiteboard just happened to have gotten shoved in the closet. Someone pulls out they're like, what's this? And I looked at them. I'm like, oh, that's the whiteboard we used to hang in our main conference room. And it still had the notes from that meeting there on the whiteboard. I was like, this is so cool. Historical moment. I'm taking a picture. And then I'm like, wait a minute. This is weird. It's in my hand, but it's recognizably in my own handwriting, but many of the things that I'm writing there are horrible ideas.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we sat down and we had a meeting where we specked out what we would now call the MVP as well as the longer term vision for the company. And we had this whiteboard. All of us debated what features should be in and out or what should be on the whiteboard. And I can remember writing down. I have my visceral memory. I have the physical memory of writing down the things that were going to be necessary for the company to succeed and being right. And my co-founder is arguing with me about not having their perspective there being wrong. And I'm like, good thing and I'm like, one of the things I remember telling this story. Anyway, we moved offices shortly after that time and that whiteboard was lost.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't come college newspapers was like, just happened to catch an interview with this guy at a critical moment in his life when he just didn't know what he was talking about yet. And like now he's really ambitious. Now Facebook's vision is this really ambitious thing. And people are very at pains to say that he always had that vision from the beginning. And he talks about it. And like, that may be true, but the documentary evidence exists. And I'll just give you one of my own stories about that. In one of my companies, we moved offices relatively early on because we started on a really, really crappy small office. Then we moved to a larger space. And I remember sitting in that office when there was just five of us.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through the process of building the company. So, again, not to be spiritual about it, but I actually believe that building a startup is in large part a process of self-discovery. You actually are discovering what is true about the thing that you yourself believe. And part of that's because when we fantasize about the vision that we never have to make any tradeoffs, the product is infinitely popular, infinitely cheap. Everything's just like there's no trade-offs to be made where real-life courses to make trade-offs. And then you find they're like, oh, I have to choose. Would I rather have a high-end product only for really rich people? Or would I rather have a product for this industry or this sector or this group or that group? Like it can be painful. But also founders learn to talk about the things they care about over time. So, I mean, go on YouTube. If you've never watched the interview with Zuck on his couch at Stanford talking about Facebook, it's a remarkable vineyard, just some college.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just really different. I mean, Paul Graham used to boast about that as one of the features of Y Combinator that the founders they would get to come to the dinners would tell you the true story of what really happened. And that was critical information you couldn't get anywhere else except at Y Combinator. And I was like, wait a minute, is he saying that everyone just lies on stage when they tell the story publicly? I don't know if that's something to boast about. Like you're calling all your guest liars. And then like I've hosted a lot of those events. I'm like, oh, yeah, people lie on stage. I see. So I think part of the problem is just like trying to find out the truth of what happened is really challenging. But there's another element that I think is interesting, which is, you know, pivot is defined as a change in strategy without a change in vision, right? So we have this idea that the founder has the vision. Then they try to figure out how to make the vision happen and they find a different way. But like the vision stays constant. But the truth is a little bit more complicated than that because the founder's vision also evolves. Founders discover what the vision actually is.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choosing which elements of what actually happened to emphasize and where to put your weight, you can tell the story. So like, yes, I would say there's like the percentage of people that know that they pivoted and then there's another percentage of people that didn't admit it, but they actually did. And it's really hard to assess from the outside. I mean, I know this from having worked with enough startups where I know the outside story and I know the inside story”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that does sound right. So it's interesting. I used to do this exercise for founders where I would tell them the story of IMVU two different ways. The first way is one in which we got everything completely wrong. And just sounds like we were complete idiots and we had to pivot so many times. And then I would tell the same story again, but where we got everything right and we were geniuses and everything that happened vindicated. And then people wouldn't believe me. I like both stories are true.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dying, and then they can take what they learned into the next company or into the next pivot or the next iteration of what it should be. Or sometimes the right thing to do is just to step aside and let a different CEO take over. Or, you know, there's just so many ways you can go about it. But as with any pivot situation, the hardest part is always just to admit the facts as they are. And then you do it yourself, where it's just like, what is the situation? Is it working? Can't tell you how often people just can't accept it's not working. And you get investor updates. How many investor updates have you ever received where it's like we're crushing it? Everything's going great. And the very next investor update is we're out of business giving money back. It's like, well, you had no, their last investor update said you were crushing it. It was absolutely no indication there was any problem. Like, no, of course there was an indication, but you were just lying about it. So don't be that person.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just there's no indentured servitude anymore. It's okay. It's okay to move on. And then the question is like everything moves into a tactical conversation about shut it down, give the money back, do a really hard pivot into the new thing. It depends a lot on the specific factors of the situation. But it's, I think we do founders a disservice if we act like this is easy. Or is it, I mean, it's just, it's gut wrenching and it's really difficult. And like not to be too spiritual about this, but like it really goes right to the issue of ego identification for so many people, they are their company. And so for the company to die, they also must die. Like it feels like you're going to die. And I think that is like, that's part of the mental health problem. So people, you know, as they get older, as they mature, as they have a spiritual practice, I hope they can learn to disidentify with the company and not feel like it's so personal so that it is possible for the company to die without them.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's like that is the really scary situation. It's like we all have these moments of doubt, and sometimes the right answer is to overcome the doubt and go for it. And it's actually part of the genius of the startup system, you know, the people, just people criticize venture financing and all the problems with the Silicon Valley. And of course, do it to ourselves. So there's plenty of things to criticize. Like one of the genius things about it is like, at the end of the day, you do run out of money, the thing. You're forced to declare bankruptcy. That's actually a really positive feature of the system. So a lot of founders just can't do it. But I will say like the thing I try to ask people to do is really take some time to introspect and just ask yourself, do you actually want to be here if you could magically wave a magic wand and you were to start a new company right now? Would it be this one?”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you know the business plans I actually live through this once? There's a business plan. Business plan says six months after launch, we will have almost no customers and almost no revenue. And that's when the hockey stick will commence. And I remember being there in month six being like, we are on time, on budget. This plan is everything's happening just like the plan, hockey stick to commence. I'm walking to my watch. And then we just stayed on the flat part into the far horizon. And people would laugh and I'd be like, okay, now if you're following startup leader and you're in the reality or you yourself are in the reality sort of field and you're on the flat part of the hockey stick. Are you now if it's ever going to stick or you're just going to be And people would be like, ha ha ha ha.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard. I mean, of course, if it's going to fail, you should shut it down. But everyone's like, but I thought it's always darkest before the dawn. And it's like, sometimes it is. You know what else is really dark? Like when you're dead, so like, what's the difference? Everything comes back to. I used to tell people the most uncomfortable laugh line in my early talks about lean startup was when I talked about the people used to talk a lot about Steve Jobs and the reality distortion field. And I would be like, okay. You're in the reality distortion field. You're on the flat part of the hockey stick.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you get rich, but it's not good. And I mean, I just the other day, a friend was telling me about a friend of his who sold this company exited for like, say, $300 million or something, made a lot of money and committed suicide like not that long later. People follow the Tony Shea story. I knew Tony. I was a horrible tragedy. Like, what's going on? So I just feel like there are worse things than having your startup fail. And so building a company you hate that becomes a maligned force in the world that you have to go pretend you weren't involved with or like you feel complicit in what like that's way, way worse. And I wish more founders would take that more seriously early on.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that people don't appreciate the extent to which people act like having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen to you. And like, man, that's not even in the top 10. It's bad. I've done it. It's awful. It's really bad, but far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie undead company that you hate, but you can't leave. Have I met people like that? And like, we're having a mental health crisis among founders that's not talked about enough. People started talking about like the downside mental health risk. Obviously, the stress of being a founder is hard, but like, look what's happening to the people that are so-called successes. When you build a company and you sell it out and it becomes something that you find abhorrent,”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll be known as the guy who got fired for that. And eventually someone will want to work with me because that's what they want. If nobody wants that, then I'll go find a job in a different industry. Like I don't want to be in an industry that doesn't, that's how I want it to be.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always tell people to just get fired for doing it the way you think is right. Like there's nothing that was a faster career accelerator than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you got fired over it. Like the people that that magnetizes to you are going to be way happier. You're going to be so much happier being a place that appreciates that. That was a big career accelerator for me. Not that I actually got fired, but I was willing to be fired for my beliefs. And I remember sitting there. I was going to a board meeting where I for sure I was going to be fired. And I was like, well, I just don't believe in building products the conventional way. This is, again, before lean startups. So I was like, I didn't even have a language for it. But like I had a strong conviction that the way I was doing it was the right way. And I was like, well, I'll just.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing an MVP that lacks craft doesn't test the thesis. So I think people want to set up a dichotomy here that doesn't really exist. I'm totally in favor of that when people have that authentic desire. But I also meet a lot of people that are just faking it. They don't have taste. They don't have a design ethos. They don't have. So like if you don't have that stuff, where are you going to get it from? Well, good news, experimentation will get you there if you let it because you will eventually learn the habits of mind, the patterns of the things that work that make sense.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then that to me, that means like having a respect for craft, for design, for perfection, that increases the need for experimentation and testing for all the other stuff. Because we've already invested a huge amount of our energy and force into this thing that we really care about. Well, then the other stuff, you know, like, then do we also have to do this fancy press campaign? Do we also have to go put the founder's base on billboards and put them up around town? Are those all part of your craft? Like, I just feel like people use that as a catch-all excuse to do all kinds of stuff. But I think the idea that craft is a signal to your customers.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right primitives having the right abstraction layers, like using the right tools in the right way, having high quality people on your team, like all those things let you go faster, not slower. And a big part of Lean Startup is about helping teams get into that optimal configuration by acting as a speed regulator because there's such a thing as optimal speed, which we can get into if people are interested. But another part of Kraft is just an excuse for just avoiding feedback, like making things pretty in the way that I want them to be because I want them to be that way. Even there, when I meet people like that, people are just like, sorry, my artistic ethos is this and it has to be this way. Then I'm like, excellent. Then that's not one of your leap of faith assumptions that you're willing to test. So like, so be it. Don't pretend to test it. Just be like, I'm not like we're just going to do it this way because that's how we do things. And it's fine. And I think that's a big, like when companies are a core value, I'd rather go out of business than violate my core value. I also respect that too.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source