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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't care how big my market is. I'll just build for all the people like me and I have a huge tribe, then I'll be hugely successful. If not, I'll just be an artist doing my thing. I have total respect for that. That's like the ends and the methods are totally aligned. Where people get into trouble, I think, is when you want to use craft as an excuse to not get any feedback. So what I tell people is like, first of all, there's an element of craft that is just like whatever you do, how are you going to go about it? Whether you're building an MVP or a fully featured whatever thing you're doing, like, you know, I'm a software engineer by training. Like my code is a certain way. I have a certain craft in the way that I write software because I think that's the best way and that produces the best outcomes. I will never compromise that. And compromising that in the name of going fast is stupid, right? Like write crappy code. You spend more time firefighting than you do writing code in the future. So a certain amount of craft is just about keeping your options open. And actually it's very much like favorable to speed using the”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have made that button have a really nice feel. I would have sacrificed all this other stuff. And I mean, I've actually worked on microwaves and refrigerators and stuff with actual physical buttons. And like even your crappy kitchen microwave that you paid $60 for at Walmart or whatever, if you've never seen one of those things manufactured, it's actually incredible. The amount of craft that goes in behind the scenes to wire up every one of those buttons that are never pressed by a human being is actually really painful if you start to think about, wow, that's a lot of human energy being wasted. The elements of craft I think are critically important. First of all, part of craft is perfection. Perfection is an attribute of quality, and we have to go back to the first thing in order to know what perfection is, you have to know what the customer believes. You have to know you have to be perfect for some purpose, for some person. Some people just say, well, I'm just going to build for myself. And that way I solve the problem. That's totally fine. That's true. If that's you, go nuts. You might only have a market of one, but you'll be happy. So be it. And I think there are, and there are startups like that, it's like, well,”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that's a great question. People use the word craft to refer to so many different things. Like I personally find a tremendous beauty in simplicity. So, like, I would much rather people do one thing extraordinarily well than 20 things half assed. And like, how many products do you use? We're like, could you like, there's like 92 buttons on here, of which I only ever press one.”
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 to tell ourselves that story. But anyway, the number one lesson of the scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn. And so if you set yourself up in a position where psychologically you can't admit that something didn't work, you can't learn. And that's like, that really is the essence of MVP. It's just like whatever the catastrophic thing that's going to destroy your company is going to be, we just want to find out as soon as possible so that there's still time to do something about it. We don't just die and move on.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much faster on the next thing that we did. It was really amazing to see. They were like, now I understand what you mean. Most people live very cauddled lives that have not actually really dealt with this kind of failure in their business career, obviously, like in their personal lives. They'll have all kinds of trauma and worked at a crappy company and have a horrible experience, but they haven't experienced this specific thing where like you are the hero of the hero's journey. You are the protagonists of the story. And the thing is not just a setback, but you just die actually fails. It's so psychologically damaging that even people that have had that experience, a psychological defense mechanism is to tell themselves that that didn't happen. And like you know it better than anybody. How many startup founders are like adamant that they didn't ever fail, they didn't pivot. Everything's exactly the way they saw it at the beginning. And it's like, I've been around enough startups to know how often that is just not true.”
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 able to pivot into the thing that ultimately got us approved. The reason I tell this story is every bit of work we did that went into that partnership agreement for almost two years turned out to be a waste of time. Because in the end, partnership agreement fell apart. So like if we had won a few extra cluck, our margins wouldn't be higher if we had extracted more fees from the partner. We would have had less liability. People were always like, we'll have the liability for this and the liability for that. Think about all the things. This thing was hundreds and hundreds of pages long document. mattered. In the end, the partnership was never consummated. No customer, nothing ever happened. And the interesting thing and the reason for the story is that the people who went through that experience with me”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we got to take an extra week to deal with this point. We don't have an extra week. It's like, but this thing's taken two years. What's a one week? I'm like, no, every day is soap. We have to get the learning as soon as possible. And I was like constantly haranguing everybody involved. We got to go faster, faster, faster. You've got to give on this point. People were walking all over us. We were getting just destroyed in the negotiation. I was like the weakest, lanest person rather than just like, we got to raise the money. I was anything to get speed anyway. Long story short, we get all the way to the end. We get the thing approved by the SEC staff and then like we get ambushed. And like long story short, the SEC withdraws their approval and the whole thing is dead. The partner, we have to break up the partnership agreement. Everything goes to hell. And I thought the company was going to die. And it was a totally miserable time. One of the worst things that ever happened to me in my life, I was totally upset. And, you know, in retrospect, I can laugh about it because it turns out, of course, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it's actually the best thing that ever happened to me as a lot of startup things are because from that.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the early iterations of it that didn't work, we were building on partner infrastructure. It was a very different product back then. I don't want to get into all the legal nitty gritty because it's kind of dry. But anyway, it took us six whole months. It took us time to raise the money, build the team, do all stuff, you know, get all the lobbyists and lawyers everything in place. And then we had to go do this partnership agreement. The partnership agreement itself took like six months to get in place. And then we had to go to the SEC and get approval. And so it was like a very complicated multi-stage process. Probably took, I think I just described two years in my life, you know, end to end there. And the whole time I was talking to the team about our goal with this whole thing is to learn what is actually necessary to get customers to list on our stock exchange.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through, like, okay, if you want to have a process for determining what to do here, you should first brainstorm your leap of faith assumptions and categorize them this way and select them like this. Okay, now for each assumption, brainstorm the metrics you might use, you know, select the metric you want. What is your learning metric? And then from their brainstorm MVP, score them according to this formula, and then like use that to help people. Anyway, if people can follow that they want the thing I learned is that if people are having trouble coming with MVP, The problem is usually upstream in the chain of deductive reasoning from the vision down to the MVP. It's like usually people are just not super clear on what do I want to learn. And it's the most common reason is because people don't want to admit that they don't know. So as an entrepreneur to say that we're going to test to find out what customers want is really hard. I'll give you an example from my own experience. You know, LTSC, I said it's taken us like 10 years to get the thing approved and going. It's a really very difficult product to build.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the truth. Whether you admit it or not, that's the truth. So we have to just, that's why I say let's just double check. So simple, succinct advice. The first tip is write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP, cut it in half, and cut it in half again and build that. Honestly, if you just do that, that's really not that bad. The nice thing about MVP is it's one of those U-shaped curves where like if you get even in the vicinity of optimal, you're going to be fine. And most people's natural idea of what is necessary is so laughably wrong. People are naturally off by like usually one or two orders of magnitude. It's very common for you to meet a team that is trying to do a hundred times more work than is necessary to test their assumption. So first thing is just try being uncomfortably small in the thing that you actually make. And if you're having trouble with that in the startup way and the sequeling startup, I really go through because it's really more for a corporate large company audience.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't say you also don't know what product is. That's true. I can't tell you how many times a service has turned out to be a product or vice versa. Like people embody their insight about customers in the wrong way all the time. That's super common. That's funny. No, but that like all the criticisms of MVP are really just people expressing their frustration with how uncertain startups are. Yeah, it really sucks. This is not a good way to make a living if you want to retain your mental sanity. If cognitive dissonance, if you find that painful, like this is not the right job for you because it's really hard to hold in your head. I have this ambitious vision. I know what's going to work. You got to do confidence, get everyone together. There's no substitute in this world for a human being stepping forward and just like, I am going to make this thing happen. And if you do that, you're putting yourself way out on a limb. It's really difficult. It's really hard to admit that. And I also do not know how to make it happen.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sixes every time. Okay, so there are those people and they give a lot of the advice in the world, but I don't know that it's necessarily those of us who don't have the double six luck should necessarily be following it.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was like nothing to do with anything they cared about. It was nothing to do with efficiency. We would never buy this. And they're like, but you haven't even looked to page two to see how efficient it is. They're like, we don't pay for efficiency. We build data centers, how much they cost to operate is somebody else's problem. That's the thing people don't appreciate is like these insights are so obvious in retrospect that everyone's convinced that it won't happen to them. When I teach students in Lean Startup, they're like, this is so dumb. They do one case after another in business school and they're like, dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy, dummy. They're like, I would never make that mistake. And I'm always like, look, you don't have to argue with me. Just call me back when you get a job and you make when you make one of these mistakes. Like remember we had these conversations and go read the book then. And I guess by random chance there are some people in the world that just never made a mistake. The dice, you know, you roll enough dice. Somebody had the experience that dice came up, you know, double.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you want it to be? It's like, well, it'd be really great if customers would accept this set of performance characteristics. Like, well, let's go promise that because maybe they'll be like, that's great. And I'll just give you one example. I was mentioning data centers. This is a team that sold equipment in data centers. They had a serious high-end team of PhDs working on research to make the thing way more efficient. And they're going to win like a Nobel Prize in Material Sciences in order to make this product a reality. And they put, and I convinced them instead of playing three years and $18 million, you know, make the thing, let's go take a brochure, take it to some customers. And I'll never forget they took the thing into the brochure. They took it into customers and customers laughed them out of the room.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him a brochure and ask him to pre order it. And then it's like, but I can't do that. I can't have a crappy brochure. It's like, who said a crappy brochure? We can build a really high quality brochure in a lot, like in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to build the actual machine. And then it's like, well, then what is you talking about? It has really good fonts and it has pretty pictures. Maybe. What's your theory? You tell me, what do you believe about? And I'm like, well, actually, what matters is the quality of the specifications of the equipment in the brochure. It's like now we've got the leap of faith assumption. Let's go find out. And then like, but hold up, but we don't know what those specifications are going to be yet. It's like, oh, but I saw this 500-page plan over here.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As little as necessary for you. So, like, what's so, it's fascinating. Over in their mind, they often will be like, well, you know. Like a classic one is we can't sell the thing till we build the physical equipment. It's like, but do people buy, is your product bought in a showroom where people see the physical equipment? No, they buy it from a brochure. So it's like, okay, well, how about we?”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to be compared to the Sims unfavorably now, people are more advanced than the Sims. And I was like, what does this mean? How do we get more of it? Did we improve our 3D graphics? And we started doing, no one could understand why they were saying that. We used to do customer interviews. And finally, a customer was like, oh, oh, it's so great, man. In Inview, when you want to go somewhere, you teleport. The Sims, you got to wait for the guy to get up and walk around. It's so annoying. And we were just like, oh my God, how embarrassing. And for you, I mean, we didn't do inverse kinematics for a really long time.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like as a hack, it's like a little demo. I was like, well, I'll just change it so that when you click in the scene to a different spot, we'll just stop rendering the avatar in the first place and we'll put it in the second place. So it was like really, we didn't even do the proper cut. The camera would zoom over there. It was really ugly. I was really embarrassed about it. I was like, let me just play around with it and see what happens. And we shipped it to Con I was like, this is not, this is below the quality bar. This is like I just like people, I felt bad as the engineer. Everyone involved felt really bad, but we had like committed ourselves that we're going to try to experiment with stuff. We're going to see what happens before Leanstark existed. We didn't even have a content of MVP. We're going to try it and just see what happens. And we shifted and nothing happened. No one cared. I was like, but then we used to do these daily tracking surveys. We just sample people and ask them what they think of the product. And in the tracking surveys, people started to say that IMBU was the most advanced avatar product they'd ever used. We were like, people would be like,”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we trending up again? Okay, it's really hard for me to keep track. Even while I was working on it every few years, it was either the future or nobody wanted to do it. I bet sales of Snow Crash, you know, probably not that cyclical thing to them, and it's hot. People read it. Otherwise not. Anyway, we built a version, our first version of IMVU. We built with 3D avatars like in a cafe or in a scene. And the avatars were all anchored in place because we didn't have the technology called inverse kinematics. We didn't have the technology that would allow an avatar like stand up and walk. You know, when you do this, the 3D grab, it has to work perfectly. The feet have to like actually glide along the surface. And it just, if it doesn't look right, you wind up in the uncanny valley and people find it horrible. So we're like, can't have that. So we just have the avatar to sit there. And people felt the product was claustrophobic. They would always be like the sims. Lets me move around. Why am I stuck here in the chair? It was a very common thing in customer feedback. But we were like, we can't afford to do the expensive thing. We couldn't do it, couldn't do it. And one day.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small thing they did turned out to be more valuable than the competitor. And I'll just give you one example, one of my favorites. I come from 3D graphics and avatars and metaverse stuff, which of course now is bad. It's one of these things that goes through these hype cycles. And I'm like, are we actually in the hype cycle or are we in the tropics?”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launched this thing, it had 0% sign ups. And they're like, it's a good catastrophe. We made the wrong value pro. It's like, well, how do you know? From one experiment, you could never know. You have to be willing to do a series of experiments. And again, the logic of MVP is just products take time to build. Like the best products in the world, everything takes time. Tell me it takes a month, a year. You're like, AI will mean I could build any product I want instantly. But like, it's not instantly. It's going to take time. During that time that the product is under construction, There's going to be some moment in time when you have half the product. Just logically speaking, you first have 10%. So when you have half the product, let's have customers use half the product. It doesn't cost you anything extra. You had to do it. You build a natural experiment anyway. Have them use it and tell you it's only half as good or it's unusable because it's so bad. Excellent. Good. But the startup literature is littered with examples of people where less is more where the crap”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least confirms that we're on the right track. Okay. And then we call it establishing a baseline when we talk about innovation accounting and the metric side of lean startup. Let's go find out how bad the situation is right now so that we can then know that we improve from it. Because like the thing I actually see from people who in the name of quality will wait a long time to ship a product is they ship it ruth really high quality and nobody uses it. And now we don't know why. Is it because our idea of quality is wrong? Is it because the value prop is fundamentally like I feel like building a high quality wrong value prop is nothing to be proud of. There's no craftsmanship in that. Or is it, you know, like I once had a company that built a really beautiful product, amazing land. Everything was awesome, but there was a JavaScript error where when you clicked the download button, the signup button, whatever, it just, it didn't click.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm like, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. And if you don't, then definitely don't rely on that. Definitely do some experimentation. Go get those cards. But even if you have the taste, like if you're completely right, what can it hurt to double check? Like my view is like, oh, let's have 10 customers look at it and have them throw up about how it's so horrible.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the time you find out whether that's any good. And look, if you look at the pivot stories, I'm sure you found this too, very often 90% of the work in the first version is thrown away. No matter how high quality it was. And in fact, as an engineer, that was part of my original disillusionment with the agile software movement that ultimately leaned startup is that people promised me that if I followed these best practices, I would eliminate waste from my work. But if I build something that customers don't want, that's the ultimate waste and nobody protected me from that. So I don't really care how high quality the initial MVP is because quality is defined by the customer. And if we don't know who our customer is, we literally don't know what the word quality means. So that's where I think founders really run into trouble and everyone's like, well, I'm Steve Jobs. I have the magic taste. And it's like, well, first of all, do you have the years and decades of failures and experience from which that taste derives? Okay. If you do them.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bar is here, and the thing just has to be that good. I'm like, excellent, and I can't have very many features, I guess, can it? Like, what do you mean? You just told me the bar is way up there. So we better do like just the one critical feature at that level of quality. And then if that works, we'll do the next one. And then, of course, like, oh, no, no, no. I need to do all the features at all the quality. It's like, well, then what are we testing?”
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're like, what the hell is APC? Never heard of that. That's the much more common response that I get. So let's grant the premise of the question that like expectations are high. And if we launch an app and it doesn't meet people's expectations, they won't like it. First of all, what really are the consequences of that in the early part of the startup, we had to do a lot to explain to people the difference between a product launch and a marketing launch. launch the product to customers without telling anybody that you did that it's okay like no one's going to find out it's not going to be big news and of course like when once you're a big successful company that's totally different issue where like now you put your corporate brand on stuff but like if you're an actual startup nobody cares so like it's okay to try it but like the other thing that i think people don't appreciate is that mvp is very flexible so if you tell me like when i work with entrepreneurs like listen i'm sorry our customer is the”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be like, you're wrong. I did the right. I got to get mad at them. But then I got a little smarter. And I'd be like, XYZ, you say. And I'd be like, taking notes, right? Like, oh, interesting. Now, sometimes XYZ would be the exact next three features of my roadmap. And again, I want to argue with them as I know I was, you know, like I knew. And I eventually used to be like, oh, thank you for that wise feedback. And then when we launched.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like people who build deep sea oil drilling machines, or jet engine. I've worked with companies where the standards are actually really high and it makes iOS apps seem like pretty basic. It's like, yeah, okay, nothing blows up if people like your app. But like even in these really high-end industries and really high stake situations, the cost of offering someone to buy something that they don't like is really not that high. They just say no. And like a lot of MVP, it's just about containing the liability of making a mistake. So like, yes, one of the things I really encourage people to do is go find 10 customers, not 10 million, but like find 10 customers, get them to use the product and have them tell you what's awful. That's okay. And like I used to be so upset when I used to launch a product, if customers would argue with me, like people used to be like, you idiot, I can't believe you lost launched this product without features XYZ. They're so essential.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that question because, first of all, I get it a lot. And also it's important for us to really understand like people think that MVP is about a specific tactic. So like an MVP is like bare bone, stripped down thing that will crash your computer. But it's not. That's not anything to do with MVP. 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 hypothesis is true or not. And so part of a successful test is to understand what are the demands of customers in our market. Now, the funny part is people have a real fear of failure in product. I mean, we all have this deep, deep, deep fear. So the first answer is like, you think user expectations are high in the iOS App Store. You should try the purchasers of, you know, battery backup systems for data centers.”
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'm like, no, I should have said for the better. I didn't know I had to say it. I thought it was obvious. I thought we all agreed. So I kind of feel like that is also a major oversight. And, you know, I'm making light of it now, but like it's had catastrophic consequences. Not really, I think, I don't think lean startup has led people in that way. I think it has much more to do with other social forces. But I feel bad that I missed my chance to take a stand on something that has turned out to be quite important.”
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 I was like, did I? Again, I actually went back and reopened the book. And I was like, did I tell anybody that they should change the world? And if I did, I assume I specified for the better. And it's actually right there in black and white, like right in the introduction startup, one of the lights, like a throwaway line, you know, this is the technique that will give the entrepreneurs of tomorrow the tools they need to change the world.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like that is the meme of our time for the tech industry. Like, every company was about changing the world. Forgot to ask for the better. I always just took it for granted that our goal was to make the world a better place. Those are the values I was raised with. That's what I thought we were doing. And I was railing about it for a while. I got really, I would get depressed. Remember, don't be evil. And there's been all these moments in the tech industry where it seemed like we were going to really do something extraordinary. And then just like the things that these companies become is so depressing. And I was like, well, I at least made it clear.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success now, what are the principles for which how you scale up a big enterprise now? It has many lean startups within it and stuff like that. And I don't think I wrote anything wrong in that section, but I really cringe to read it now because it's so blithe and just like step one, do this, step two, do that. It makes it sound so easy is so simple. And of course, like I've subsequently written a whole book longer than Lean Startup just to illuminate those principles and explain how they work in real life because I actually had the privilege of getting to go do that with companies of really extraordinary scale. So I'm a little embarrassed now to be like, I made it sound so easy. I hate to mislead any entrepreneurs into thinking any part of entrepreneurship is going to be easy because it's just setting people up for disappointment. And the other funny bit is, you know, that meme on Reddit, the Star Wars meme, where Anakin Skywalker says, I'm going to change the world. And Pat Mike's like, for the better, right? And then pause. And she's like, for the better, right?”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, I would change everything about it. It's why actually I won't let myself do it. 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 everything more nuanced, you'd totally lose the thrust of the argument of the thing they were trying to do and their own famous like really messes with you psychologically. So like you don't want to expose your readers to that. Like go get therapy. Don't make me destroy the thing that made your book amazing. So as an author, of course, I think so many elements of it could be improved. The one that is the most glaring to me, well, I guess there's two. I'll mention two just because they're relevant. One is I'm a little embarrassed as a chapter towards the end of the book where I talk about the scaling of lean startup. So it's like, okay, you've had.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm like, what do you like? How does that advance the state of the art? And how does that help entrepreneurs in any way? And I'm not even really sure what they're trying to accomplish by doing that. That's something that I've grown confused about is like, what is the purpose of this discourse Other than just to kind of be reflexively contrarian, I don't know.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and whatever. It's just like I read it in somebody's book that's what Lean is about. And I was like, man, did I forget to write it in the book? I was so gaslighted that I went, I actually went back and cracked open a copy of Lean Startup. And I was like, on what page do I address this? I was like, on page nine in the introduction, one of the first things in the book. I was like, okay, phew. I did say it. So like that's pretty common, you know, that turned the crank thing about optimization. That's pretty common. And then like pivots, people perennially misunderstand what a pivot is and like, again, whether that's a descriptive or a prescriptive thing is really tricky. And so, you know, it's like those are, I feel like at this point, people are just being willfully ignorant. It's like, it's okay to criticize lean startup. That's no problem. It doesn't bother me. I think it's good to do this. It's healthy to do so. But like to just trot out those same old things.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I wrote an article God five or ten years ago, I can't even remember how many years ago now it was like top misconceptions about lean startups. 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.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Responsibility about was it in fact net positive, but was it helpful to people? And so I try, it's like part of what motivates me to try to really get it right and not just get it right for my own satisfaction, but get it right as evidenced by what happens when people use it. And that's why, I mean, that's why testing and experimentation is like such a big part of my life and my theory. To me, that's how we square the circle of our responsibility in a highly uncertain world is you go find out what happened when people use the idea. And if it's not right, even after their misunderstandings, it's still not right, then you've got to make it better and find a way to communicate it more clearly. So it's kind of an eternal challenge, but I think an important one.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slander on clay. Like that's so unfair. A bunch of tech bros use disruption as a code word for all kinds of dumb stuff has nothing to do with his theory, has nothing to do with his work. It's like, have they even read the work, man? So I wanted, like, I was one of his defenders, you know, and especially after he passed, I was feeling, I was very emotional about it. It's not fair. But then the more that I've sat with it, the more I thought, gosh, maybe we are a little bit responsible for the things we put into the world. And it's terrifying because, of course, you can't control what people do. You can't control. Like people, a lot of people are willfully ignorant. Whenever someone says something where I'm like, gosh, five seconds on Wikipedia and they could have found out the truth about the thing they're talking about. So, you know, we live in an era where ignorance is optional. That's cool, but also a little bit scary. So like, I think taking on that responsibility, this is true for anyone who makes a product. I think it's not actually unique to authors at all. When you make something put out into the world, on the one hand, you don't have any control about what happens next. And yet I do think we bear a certain responsibility.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Once a year at least, someone still writes to me and says that we should have used a different term for MVP, that the misconceptions around MVP are driven by the choice of the term. I always write them back and say, like, please tell me the better term and popularize it, and I'll use it. It's a great idea. I'm more aware of the limitations than anybody else. And I'll tell you another thing that I think people don't appreciate enough. Everyone wants to be a thought leader these days. It's like a disease. When Clay Christensen died, you know, I knew him and admired him a great deal. And his endorsement of my work was like one of the most important, like for me, from the old guard of management thinkers, for him to say that it was worthwhile was like really a big deal to me. And yet there was this big debate. It's now a little bit older now about whether he's responsible for all the bad things people have done in the name of disruption. And the first part of me is like, that's an outrage.”
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 what victory looks like. It's not about they don't throw you a parade and say the thing. And even though people who are your critics are still grumble about it. But like at the end of the day, the new entrepreneurs who come in just take for granted that this is the conceptual vocabulary of entrepreneurship. And then they do with it what they will. And I've learned to really appreciate that as much as my ego, of course, likes to get into fights with people. It's like, no, that's actually what winning looks like.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to be excommunicated. And it's like, guys, no, no, no. I wrote extensively in the book. Did you read, it's a scientific theory, which means 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. Well, when you have that attitude that whatever works is the thing that like the truth is what matters and like people's quiet moments of helpfulness, that's our metric of success. It kind of takes the like hype and drama and stuff that drives like press coverage and what takes it all out of it. And I don't miss it at all. I feel much happier doing that than I ever did when I used to travel a lot and do a lot more public stuff. And I think partly, again, part of the change is COVID and not conferences went away for a while. So it was like a quiet, quiet time. But I feel like it's actually been really amazing.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really the whole ballgame. No one had to lose in order for us to win. I don't do this as much anymore, but occasionally someone still who wants to like make a fight between lean startup and agile or agile and design thinking or this and that. And I tried really hard if we look at lean startup. It is full of citations and connections to Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing and design thinking and customer development and DevOps and software craftsmanship and everything I could find. I really wanted to show how these things work together. And then we went through a phase where people wanted me to make it into a religion for real. People used to write me and say so-and-so on the internet is writing about me and startup and they're wrong. You need to make them stop. It's like, what power do you think I have to make someone stop writing? And I was like, they can write whatever they want. And then the other thing that people said was, well, Lean Startup is about this particular set of practices. If someone finds a new practice, they're a heretic.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revival to just the default thing that people did, even the people that disagree have to carry the meme in order to criticize it. So it was fascinating to find myself on the other side of this thing. And when I would meet young founders coming into the industry for the first time, and they're like, seems obvious. And I'm like, it was only five years ago that people thought this was so crazy. They're yelling at me. Now you think it's obvious, like it's really interesting to have something go from controversial to obvious. And, you know, and of course, like tons of people who were really opposed to it at the beginning came back. You know, now they say that they knew it all along and they were my bigger, you know, just you see, you see how it changes people's minds. So it's hard to generate that religious energy and excitement around something that everyone views as obvious. And it really was hard for my, just like as an ego matter, I want the validation of the winning and the this. And I realized at a certain point that like the victory is not that this fancy company used it or whatever. The victory actually is in the stories that people tell me about how the book was helpful to them.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us to the death, and we're going to win it. And it's not like that at all. 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 are doing it the old way. To complaining that it was overhyped and over before ever passing through the intervening stage of finding out what it was, that was really interesting. I'll never forget like TechCrunch had an article this is years and years ago about how like Lean Startup is overhyped. And I was like, you haven't even talked. That was the first entry point to talking about it. I was like, could you at least learn to use the word pivot correctly? And then criticize it for being overhymed? Is that all possible? So it went from like insurgent.”
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 an interesting question. You know, we used to do a lean startup conference every year, and then I stopped because of COVID and we haven't resumed yet. So it was like we used to have an annual opportunity to bring people together, assess the state of things, hear the latest updates and stories. And then I really feel the lack of it. I miss it. We tried to do online versions, but it just, it wasn't, it didn't feel right to me. And that's partly COVID and the thing that our world has been going through the last few years, but it's also partly I didn't understand what it would be like to start a movement until I'd actually done it. And I just, I remember the first conferences we did, the first events we did, had the feeling of a religious revival. People were like, we've got the new thing. We are going to stick it to the man. And I really thought, okay, my job is going to be to lead these hordes into battle. I really had like a martial metaphor. I used it just a second ago, combat of ideas. I was ready for like the old ideas are going to fight.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up with a theory or a method or a process that produces the maximum of something, but then it's like, what is that thing good? Is that actually helping us accomplish some kind of goal? And so that, you know, I think that first principles thinking is very helpful for that too. But yeah, I don't know. I guess to really answer your question, the truth, true answer is I don't know. I've just always felt like I was wired that way. I have a love of ideas and want to know why things work.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People call me a first principles thinker, which I love that I was a big compliment, but I feel like it conjures up for people this idea that I sit in a cave for years and years and like conjure up the magic idea. It's like, no, I wish people had all the outtakes of all the concepts I've tried. At least it was on my first try, you know, the conceptual vocabulary. It was not the first time I got it right. It came through a lot of trial and error, a lot of trying to figure out what works and doesn't work. First, in my own career, my own work, then trying to give advice to other people and trying to translate what worked for me to see what would work for them and then to answer the questions that I thought were the natural ones. Under what circumstances does it work? And when would it not be appropriate? What predictions does a theory make that we could then go see if are true or not true? And then the kind of the bigger picture thing is like, what are we really doing here? Like what does success even look like? And so like that, I think it's the thing we all really grapple with is, you know, it's very easy to come.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pivot. I'm just saying that is what it's called when you change the strategy but try to have fidelity to the vision. It needs a name because we do it all the time. And even when we don't do it, we talk about doing it and we can't reason about it if we can't. And so this is descriptive part. And then that's the real work, honestly, is just saying like, what is it? To me, the big question from the beginning was like, what is a startup really? Why is it so different from a big company? Why did none of the best practices that I learned in my career work? It was like a survival mechanism I want to know. And then once you've identified what it is and laid out the original principles of like what you're trying to do, the prescriptive parts are just a matter of deductive logic. It's like, well, okay, given that we've made this hypothesis, like what are the implications of that? And of course the prescriptive parts are important because that's how you learn whether your hypothesis is correct. So that's the other thing I think people don't appreciate.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll be like Steve Jobs, and it's like, well, he also wore the black turtleneck. Is that also part of the like, what helped me understand why does it work and is it still appropriate? And does it make sense for that industry or not? I didn't like these just so stories. And I realized looking back, I didn't have this understanding at the time, but looking back, I feel like first principles thinking, it really has two components that people pretend are one thing. And it's more one than the other. A lot of my work is just descriptive. It's not actually telling people what to do. It's simply giving a name and a concept to a thing that already happens. That's the funniest part in the early wave of criticism against lean startup. People were very angry at the idea that I was saying that a startup is an experiment. Like you can't treat a startup like an experiment. I was like, well, you could treat it however you want, but it is an experiment. People are like, well, I don't think it, you know, like people don't like the concept of pivot. There's still these anti-pivot people, anti-MV people every once in a while come out of the woodwork still to complain about it. It's like, well, I'm not telling you that you should.”
2023-10-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source