The Lean Startup

By Eric Ries

Categories: Business & Money

Most startups fail, but many of those failures can be prevented. Eric Ries defines a startup as any group creating something new under extreme uncertainty, whether it's one person in a garage or a team inside a Fortune 500 company. Borrowing from lean manufacturing, his method swaps elaborate business plans for rapid experiments and "validated learning": test your idea with real customers, measure real progress instead of vanity metrics, and change course quickly when the evidence says so.

Recommended by 11 people

• Sheryl Sandberg
• Mike Maples Jr.
• Mark Cuban
• Kevin Systrom
• Jason Calacanis
• Chris Dixon
• Ben Horowitz
• Andrew Ng
• Patrick Bet-David
• Jeff Immelt: “The two things that influenced me the most were Marc Andreessen's 2011 Wall Street Journal article, 'Why Software Is Eating the World,' and 'The Lean Startup' — Eric Ries's book, which I literally read in a day.”
• Shane Parrish: “This book has become part of the cultural fabric of the startup community”