The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

by Eric Ries

A comprehensive theory of entrepreneurship should address all the functions of an early-stage venture: vision and concept, product development, marketing and sales, scaling up, partnerships and distribution, and structure and organizational design.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

out of place.

ventures

adept

auton...

controv...

medd...

vision...

“Yeah, I’ve read The Innovator’s Dilemma.

prerequisites

appetite

“intrapreneurs”

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

institution

encompasses

innovation

repurposing

dev...

context

confront

To open up a new business that is an exact clone of an existing business all the way down to the business model, pricing, target customer, and product may be an attractive economic investment, but it is not a startup because its success depends only on execution—so much so that this success can be modeled with high accuracy. (This is why so many small businesses can be financed with simple bank loans; the level of risk and uncertainty is understood well enough that a loan officer can assess its prospects.)

flo...

audacious.

lit

SnapTax—provides

Intuit,

archetypal

sustaining innovation,

disruptive innovation—

meddling

“island of freedom”

genes,

astrological

delibe...

facil...

decentra...

cultivating

paradigm.

accustomed

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

validated learning.

rationalization

rig...

emb...

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s pr...

antidote

illustrate

recount

elaborate