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
And unlike in a traditional business, in a startup, you're building new process all the time.
confronting problems for the first time.
Well, Build, Measure, Learn gives us a concrete, easy to explain, easy to evaluate answer.
Whatever the thing is, if it optimizes our speed through this loop, then we do that version.
Otherwise, we don't do it.
This is a major communication error I see in leaders actually of all size companies, but especially of entrepreneurs.
If you say that if something unexpected happens, that's a failure, you have literally created the preconditions for no learning to take place.
Because the oldest lesson of the scientific method is that if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
So instead of conceiving of an unexpected result as a failure, we need to see it the way a scientist would.
And understanding that learning is not a failure is a huge problem, especially in big companies where we preach the say-do ratio so religiously that we assume that anytime something unexpected happens, it must be because of incompetent planning or incompetent execution.
Forgetting a third possibility, which is that the situation itself is too uncertain to forecast.
And all of these lean startup techniques are not about celebrating failure.
I actually don't like some people call it an embrace failure or celebrate failure philosophy.
I don't accept that.
I actually don't think that's right.
That's not the issue.
The issue is how do we define success and failure?
And to me, if we learn what is necessary, we did it in an efficient way, in a way that was humane and scientific, that actually is a success.
And it is a necessary step on our journey to building a breakthrough product.
The lean startup movement, the startup movement more broadly, I'm incredibly proud of what we've accomplished.
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