A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.
Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
If you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know what quality is.
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.
We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possible, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.
If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?
If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed – at seeing what happens – but won’t necessarily gain validated learning – If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.
The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource – the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.
Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn’t make it: It’s the ones that might have been created but weren’t.
You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don’t see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
The biggest start-up successes – from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg – were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.