Eric Ries
speaker
185 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Jun
Eric Ries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Sure, okay, so just real quick to back up, I'm a tech entrepreneur from way back when, and I wrote this book called Lean Startup in 2011 that kind of changed my life.
At its root, most people who are trying to do something new, whether they call themselves an entrepreneur or not, have this fundamental problem, which is like, how do I communicate progress when I'm in a condition of extreme uncertainty?
And if you're trying to do something fundamentally new, how are we supposed to forecast progress
how many you're supposed to have made.
Like it's actually a huge problem that we don't think about very often because conventional management systems are all based on this 20th century idea of extrapolating from a stable operating history to produce an accurate forecast.
So Lean Startup at its heart is to take the business plan, the fiction writing part of entrepreneurship or of any kind of business enterprise,
And extract from it the hypotheses, the leap of faith assumptions that have to be true for the business to be a good idea.
And then instead of just pretending like we know those are true, we try to test them using scientific methods to create what we call validated learning, using a structured experimental approach we call the minimum viable product or MVP.
And the most critical concept is that if we discover that some element of the plan is not working, it's not correct,
Then we execute a pivot.
Sorry, that's probably our most overused bit of business jargon that Lean Startup has contributed to the world, but we invented that term.
The pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
This is something that in our normal lives, we understand this concept perfectly fine.
And then for some reason in business, we are trained to forget it.
So I just want you to imagine if you start telling random people you meet on the street, I know what is going to happen in the future.
They will look at you very strange.
But in business, for some reason, we're supposed to pretend that we can predict the future when obviously we can't.
So the plan is not a problem.
It's not a problem to imagine what the future might be.
If something's going wrong, you assume it's because of one of the things on your plan that you haven't done.
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