Eric Ries (2015)

This is actually a hard question to answer. The reason is that the definition of a bug is defined by the customer. How do you know that your MVP is bug free if customers aren't using it? It's a common engineering assumption that we know what quality means and we can judge it for ourselves. But the truth is that if you don't know who the customer is, you don't know what quality means.

So, although I do try to make sure that an MVP is free of technical defects, I don't think it's possible to make it bug-free. The good news is that - at least in software - bugs are relatively harmless. If customers encounter them, you can fix them. Now that I work a lot with industrial, energy, and healthcare teams, we have to deal with this at a much deeper level. As my friends at GE like to say, nobody wants to fly on a minimum viable engine.

I've been really excited to see the addition of real entrepreneurship curriculum to schools and especially business schools. I got to play an extremely small part in the revamp of the HBS curriculum that now requires every MBA to work on a startup as part of their degree.'

But the truth is that I think the bigger impact of those changes will be on non-entrepreneurs. Think of all the people who affect the startup ecosystem: bankers, corp dev, policy makers, general managers, PE/VC, etc. For them to actually understand a little bit about startups is going to be a big positive change.

In terms of your own education, I am a big believer in a general liberal arts education. That's what's helped me the most (thanks mom!). We live in a golden age of information about startups out there on books and blogs. There's plenty you can learn without formal schooling in business. Plus, YCombinator exists.

Well said. A key part of MVPs is to help discover what the technical specifications really are. It's amazing how often the technical specs get easier once you have real customer experiments going.

Thank you!

Cory Nelson described just such an MVP here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkdsYTlEGfQ

Here's a way to think about it. Physical mass production has a huge number of steps required to achieve delivery at scale: engineering, material science, supply chain, quality, compliance, sourcing, etc etc

If you were just trying to build and sell one single engine, how much of that work is really required? You'd be amazed what engineers can come up with when you reframe the problem this way.

TBH, I often have to give special advice to startups IN the valley. We're surrounded by unbelievable resources here but also a huge amount of hype and distraction. When in doubt, serve your customers and build something amazing. You can do that anywhere. The rest will follow.

my friends at Highway One (part of PCH) are amazing at this: http://highway1.io/team/

If you want to go deep in understanding the special issues around lean hardware as it relates to supply chain, distribution, and design they take entrepreneurs on an annual trip to Shenzhen which is amazing.

Oh, and look at that, we've just added a new reward (5-day trip to China with Highway One) just for lean hardware startups to the Kickstarter campaign. I doubt that's going to last very long.

You mean the Long-Term Stock Exchange?

First of all, thank you for the kind words and for sharing what you're going through.

I think that's pretty bad advice. Here's an easy way to tell: imagine going to work at a "normal" job, 9-5, very little responsibility, rote work same day in day out. Like the movie Office Space. Does that really sound like a recipe for happiness?

I think if you're the entrepreneurial type, you'll find much more fulfillment trying to make the world a better place through your startup. But here's the catch. Don't do a startup because you think you will make a lot of money or achieve fame and fortune. I always tried to pick projects that I felt were worthwhile - even if they totally failed.

And I'm not in the 100+ hour weeks camp, either. I think if your startup really requires that level of effort on a sustained basis (we've all pulled the occasional all-nighter, but what you're describing is different), something is probably wrong with your startup's strategy.

Check out the grassroots Lean Impact community: https://twitter.com/leanimpact

Most startups are unintentional not-for-profits. At least you have the benefit of being honest about it :)

I like to think so. It's a strong core component (but seldom talked about in the mainstream press) of the Toyota Production System: respect for people.

I frankly wish more business books were held to this same ethical standard. The question that keeps me up at night is: how do you really know that the advice you're giving out will help other people? I mean sure, it worked for you, Mr or Mrs Author, but what about when read, translated, interpreted and put into practice?

That's what I'm most excited about with this campaign. We get to use The Leader's Guide and the online community to really test out these ideas and make sure that they work in the real world, even after being laundered through book form.

Not yet. I really hope someone in academia will tackle this challenge in a rigorous way. So far all of my efforts to convince academics and foundations to work on it have produced little.

In the meantime, the best test of a startup idea is: do entrepreneurs find it helpful. And I don't mean just the famous ones whose public declarations are filtered through their PR teams. What about the thousands of entrepreneurs working in total obscurity all over the world? Like the ones on this map: http://lean-startup.meetup.com/

Let's startup failure. In the movies, all those people who told you "your idea will never work, doing a startup is a bad idea, you should finish school and get a normal job" - you get to back to them and make them realize how cool you are now that you're a big success.

In real life, you get to go back to them and say, "you were right. it didn't work." Man, that is seriously painful. Especially when you're an unbelievably arrogant kid, as I was when I did my first startup.

I mentioned this briefly in the afterword to The Lean Startup.

one of my favorites: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/07/principles-of-product-development-flow.html

Food is a big category out here right now - I'm a big Good Eggs fan but also Sprig, Bento, Instacart, etc.

Too many to count: KISSmetrics, Mixpanel, Tapylitics, Yozio, Sharethrough, and so many more. (Warning: i'm an investor in some of these)

It was definitely a team effort. For timeline, let me consult the archive. On 10/20 last year I emailed Fred Wilson when I first had the idea for the campaign. Next thing I know I'm talking to Yancey from Kickstarter. I started to put the team together but we didn't start working on it in earnest until December last year.

The core team is listed on the Kickstarter page. It definitely requires a mix of logistics, editorial, and marketing skills. It's been a very fun project.

You gotta hand it to the guys at Martin Jetpack: http://www.martinjetpack.com/

I was on a tour of New Zealand years ago when I got to meet them. I had worked on a virtual jetpack years earlier in my career (gotta love virtual worlds) and so we had a great conversation about UI and controls for flying one. I assumed it was a total pipe dream but what do you know they had an IPO this year: http://www.businessinsider.com/martin-aircraft-ipo-2015-2

I don't claim any special knowledge here, but sounds like a great idea. I have the most fond memories of my local public library (hello, Mission Hills SDPL branch in San Diego) growing up. I'd hate to see them become just a temporary warehouse for ink smeared on dead trees.

I'm a pretty poor networker, since I'm an introvert and have a hard time keeping track of people I've met only a few times. I rely on friends and colleagues who are much better connectors than I ever will be and I ask them for help.

Gosh, probably too many to count at this point. A sampling of them are listed on my AngelList profile, but I'm not sure where else: https://angel.co/ericries

I'm doing my best. One of things I'm most excited about in the Kickstarter campaign is it lets me write a book that's more detailed than a typical "airport business book" and can get into the nitty-gritty of development methodologies. All that material got cut from The Lean Startup.

Yes. This has been a big part of my work the past few years and I will try to address it in the book.

:)

Do work that you are proud of even if you fail. Think about how you're being of service to your customers each and every day. And be honest with yourself: is the work I'm doing really provably creating value? If the answer is yes, it's hard to get too down.

I only invest as a hobby. I've had a pretty consistently bad track record of picking winners in my career. I turned down chances to work at pre-IPO Google and Facebook, for example.

Now, I do think it's possible to build a lean investment methodology. It's based on what I call "innovation accounting" in the book.

I don't know how much detail to get into now, but it has to do with learning to value a startup and what it's learning from first principles, rather than based on comparables or external sources. Once you can do that, you can then assess how much each MVP or pivot is really worth in net present value terms. I think it's a much more meritocratic way to allocate resources.

Man, I wish I could have all the hours of my life back that I spent arguing about vision with my cofounders. We finally - after years of wasting time - figured out that we need to focus on a concept called "synthesis" between our vision and what reality can accept. So any time we have a disagreement, let's get out of opinion land and try and formulate an empirical test. In other words: can we run an experiment that might help us figure out which direction is better.

Now a lot of people call these questions vision questions, but I later learned to call them strategy questions. The vision is the destination, the strategy is the route. A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision. If your cofounders truly don't agree on the vision - why are you building a company together?

Most cofounder disagreements, even the "vision" ones are really about strategy.

Winter is Coming

I'm not convinced. (And to be clear, I don't consider AL or FC crowdfunding really). True crowdfunding would be something like Kickstarter where every backer gets equity. I'm just too worried about the possibilities for fraud. We have a hard enough time with fraudulent Kickstarter and IGG campaigns. I think our grandparents were wise when they built the current securities regulations and while I do think some rules are antiquated and some need reform, I'm not ready to knock down the foundations quite yet.

I have a 1-year-old son at home (hi, Gabriel!) and so I do have crazy sleep, but nothing I would call a routine. I am emphatically NOT a morning person and would be happy to sleep in every day. Wish I had a more clever answer, but first thing I do is check my email on my phone. My inbox is a disaster area so I never know what I'm going to find there.

I still like Manuel Rosso's story of getting early customers in the parking lot of a Whole Foods (told in The Lean Startup).

LOL

Same as when I knew it was time to write The Lean Startup in the first place: when I was being asked the same really hard questions over and over again, and when I knew the answers.

I don't know how to answer this question in anything less than book length.

The writing itself is totally conventional: just get up in the morning and force myself to put words on the page, one excruciating day at a time.

But the real work happens outside the writing process: in testing and refining the ideas. For that, you need real-world experimentation. For TLS, I did a ton of that in workshops and in travel. For the new book, I'm hoping to use the Leader's Guide as a new form of experiment to supplement.

If they want to do art for art's sake, they should quit your company and go live the bohemian life making artisanal video games by hand. Oh, what's that they say, they want to have an impact, change the world, and become rich and famous through their art? Well, in that case, step into my office. Whatever you believe is going to work, whatever impact you believe your games will have, what can it hurt to double-check via experimentation?

Tom Eisenmann is the expert: http://platformsandnetworks.blogspot.com/

Tons! The thing that few people understand is just how vast the "mainstream" of business is. Every day I meet people who've never heard of Lean Startup - but I also meet people who haven't heard of disruptive innovation!

TBH, the most important thing is to help get more people to back the campaign. I know I'm supposed to say something less commercial than that, but that's what we really need. The campaign only runs this one time, and the greater the sample size of companies in it, the more likely we learn what we need.

I'm especially keen for people who are not "the usual suspects" to join the campaign, to help diversify the stories we can tell.

If your testing tools are sufficiently easy to use, why not use them as a matter of routine? At least to make sure you're not having an adverse side effect.

And once you're doing that, why not use cohort analysis to watch what happens over the long-term to the people in your experimental group to double check that the effects are real?

And if you're testing tools are not that easy to use, why are you shooting yourself in the foot? I wrote about this years ago: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/one-line-split-test-or-how-to-ab-all.html

I can only go by the anecdotal evidence that I hear from entrepreneurs themselves. It's extremely hard to assess its impact in aggregate. See my other answer about academia for more.

It's really hard. I almost never have time to blog anymore. I will have to dramatically cut back on speaking and consulting in order to write the book.

I don't have any better advice to offer on cofounder issues than the many essays of Paul Graham. Maybe start here: http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

For the business plan, ditch the fiction-writing part of it and focus on the spreadsheet. And not the output of the spreadsheet, the inputs. What are the customer behaviors that drive the business model? Each of those is a leap of faith assumption you can test with an MVP.

Steve was an early investor and board member in IMVU, where I was a founder. As a condition of his investing, he asked us to audit a new class on something called "customer development" he was teaching at UC Berkeley Haas school of business. My cofounder and I schlepped down there from Palo Alto a handful of times to hear what he had to say. I also ordered the original badly-edited and badly-printed version of "Four Steps" and devoured every page. I'll always be grateful to him not just for his ideas but for his mentorship.

Ouch. I also get the criticism that there's no real "lean" in lean startup. The people I've worked closely with with a real lean background, including folks at Toyota and the Lean Enterprise Institute have been very influential in my thinking about this.

The short version is that traditional lean is focused on determining the most efficient way to build what the customer wants. Lean Statup is focused on the most efficient way to find out what the customer wants in the first place.

No plans to offer colored belts in Lean Startup.

Thank you! Check out your local Lean Startup Meetup, wherever you are in the world: http://lean-startup.meetup.com/

If you want the Deluxe leader's guide, consider the Two-Pizza Team bundle, which includes it plus two actual pizzas. We'll see about adding more. What do you mean Leadership+Kickstarter bundle?

A forthcoming look at Lean Churches (I'm not kidding). Here's a sneak preview: http://www.slideshare.net/LeanStartupConf/ken-howard-final-9th

I've never tried it. It's hard enough with a team, I can't imagine how hard it would be to do solo.

I try to stick to a consistent and small check size for the initial investment. I try really hard not to pay attention to "social proof" or even know what other investors are doing.

I think there's huge potential here. One great example is Emerald Therapeutics from the Lean Startup Conference a few years ago: http://www.slideshare.net/LeanStartupConf/experimenting-on-experimentsbringing-lean-startup-to-scientific-research

I wish I had a better answer to this, but the honest answer is it was 1999 and the dot-com bubble was in full effect and I got swept up in the mania.

Thank you!

Whenever I am uncertain about the work I'm doing, I try to visualize someone just starting out on their startup journey, like I was a few years ago. If I can help them waste a little bit less of their life building stuff that nobody wants, then I think about all the good they can do with that extra time.

We need to focus more attention on what kind of company we're trying to build, not just how to get started.

I'd be more likely to try and remove a chapter. There's so many people who still don't get the basic concepts and I feel a great responsibility to try and make everything I write and say clearer to avoid misconceptions and misinterpretation.

For me it's always been a visceral thing. What's something you simply can't stop working on?

I feel deeply humbled and honored by the outpouring of support.

I'm going to share something I'm still embarrassed about. Check out this article from 1999: http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxviii/1999.11.18/features/exclusive.html

If that doesn't sound like the most ignorant entrepreneur you've ever heard... Suffice to say it was a great learning experience, once I got over the embarrassment.

I was lucky, frankly. As a CS major from a good school with a failed startup under my belt, I had a lot of job offers in Silicon Valley and I tried to apprentice myself to the best entrepreneurs I could find. I tried to make myself useful to people I thought could mentor me and who appreciated my skills.

The obvious answers are pretty much right: new york, austin, london, etc. I was just in Amsterdam and was very impressed to see how far that ecosystem has developed in just a few years.

We're still at the very beginning of this transformation in how companies and cities think about economic development. I think there is a lot of room for new startup hubs to be built and thrive.

Great idea. Sometimes goes by the moniker "Lean UX" as in http://www.amazon.com/Lean-UX-Applying-Principles-Experience/dp/1449311652 and http://www.amazon.com/UX-Lean-Startups-Experience-Research/dp/1449334911/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ZY6P3SYWTKC77QXRKS6

That kind of stuff does happen, but I don't especially think the DevOps community is guilty of it.

I use the Apple default ringtone. years ago I decided to stop fighting software company defaults, and almost never customize settings on anything I use. I go through computers and phones so frequently now that I don't trust that the settings will be remembered through upgrades, etc. So I learn to adapt myself to the defaults.

Years ago, when I was briefly advising a startup called CoolIris I used their app to change my phone background to a Mondrian painting. Somehow Apple has managed to keep that setting through all the years of upgrades.