About the Author:

Eric Ries is an American writer, blogger, and entrepreneur, he is the author of ‘The lean startup’ and ‘The startup way’. He graduated from Yale University. He was the co-founder of Catalyst Recruiting.

The content in brief:

Another startup story which created ‘The lean Startup’ book. To me, not all startups get succeeded, not every entrepreneur get succeed with the idea originally experimented. Similarly, gaining great experience in a startup battle itself is a success. It depends on how you leverage the experience to convert into success. The success could be another startup, it could be a creating a network, it could be mentorship, or it could be writing a book. Eric also had couple of failures. however, he leveraged his experience writing a book ‘The Lean Startup’ which created a movement. I would say, it is worth reading before starting a startup.

Eric says, entrepreneurship is management, managing the resources, managing money, managing people, managing the customer, and managing the schedule. To manage effectively one should fail at least once to gain experience or gain the exposure to manage from mentors and books. His deep thoughts say, lack of experience, something is being wasted while executing a startup. Eric started his journey to fill the gap of wastage. As part of his journey he studied Toyota production system, Japan. A completely new way of thinking about the manufacturing of physical goods. The lean startup framework originated with the inspiration of manufacturing industry.

The lean startup methodology is majorly aligned with 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere 2. Entrepreneurship is management 3. Validated learning 4. Build-measure-learn 5. Innovation accounting.

1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere: He says, one should not need to startup at a garage. Entrepreneurs can startup from anywhere.
2. Entrepreneurship is management: Yes, one should know how to manage the resources to create a successful company.
3. Validated learning: Do not waste time which is irrelevant to the subject of startup because, it wastes lot of time and effort with gaining zero.
4. Build-measure-learn: Eric says, do not waste mush time in planning, start with a basic plan, keep building, measure the results and learn from the built, and keep improving.
5. Innovation accounting: Make the core team accountable for the time, efforts and money so the innovation originates at right time.

‘The lean startup’ consists of three major chapters 1. Vision 2. Steer 3. Accelerate. These parts consists of 14 sub chapters with real time example like stories of Facebook, Groupon, Intuit etc.

Highlights from the book:

1. A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
2. Definition of product, one that encompasses any source of value for the people who become customers.
3. The lean startup methodology reconceives a startup’s efforts as experiments that test its strategy to see which parts are brilliant and which are crazy. A true experiment follows the scientific method.
4. The lean startup method builds capital-efficient companies because it allows startups to recognize that it’s time to pivot sooner, creating less waste of time and money.
5. By all accounts, what impressed investors the most were two facts about Facebook’s early growth. The first fact was the raw amount of time Facebook’ active users spent on the site.

Another good book

Book review: Zero to One