I suspect this book will go down in history as a classic in the business literature.

For those who don't know, the Lean Startup movement is about simply put not wasting people's time. Eric Ries argues that many entrepreneurs and their enterprises are wasteful - they make products and services nobody wants to use. The Lean Startup is the intellectual framework where bout entrepreneurs can reduce the amount of waste they are generated in unwanted products and services.

The crux of the Lean Startup philosophy is the concept of validated learning which is the validation of assumptions surrounding the selling, pricing, marketing, production, and distribution of a product or service. The Lean Startup achieves validated learning by going through the Build-Measure-Learn loop.

From the Lean Startup perspective, the first goal of any startup is not growth, but learning. Most entrepreneurs work to extreme uncertainty - they are neither completely sure what their product is nor who they are going to sell it to. In this environment, learning should be the prime and not just any sort of learning, but a learning rooted in disciplined analysis and the scientific method.

Eric provides some really interested ideas in this book that are worth checking out for anyone interested in business and entrepreneurship. The two concepts that stand out the most for me were:
(1) vanity metrics/success theater which are a set of numbers that are used to prop up the view that the enterprise is achieving success.
(2) this idea that we are ultimately operating off of assumptions and really don't know until we do some testing to verify our ideas.

Since I'm a beginner to the Lean Startup movement I wish he'd been more "slow" and shown more examples of how a company went from single product idea through several pivots to achieve success.

Overall a great read though at times the book could seem like a text book in a bad that is. Recommended reading for anyone working in the software arena or has a technology company. Probably the most fascinating aspect of the this movement is what happens when it is applied to "non-technology" companies such as a car wash or mechanic shop.

Favorite Quotes:

"As Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.""

"The irony is that it is often easier to raise money or acquire other resources when you have zero revenue, zero customers, and zero traction than when you have a small amount. Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize."

"The problem with most entrepreneurs' plans is generally not that they don't follow sound strategic principles but that the facts upon which they are based are wrong. Unfortunately, most of these errors cannot be detected at the whiteboard because they depend on the subtle interactions between products and customers."

Pros:
- Great writing style
- Covered alot of topics related to Lean Startup
- thoughtful analysis

Cons:
- got bored a couple of times
- book felt like a text book (in a bad way)