We are sitting at the front row at Startup Lessons Learned in San Francisco watching Eric Ries talk about the state of the lean startup movement. The room is full of energy, enthusiasm, and of course – entrepreneurs!
Below are my notes from the first talk and an update for all of you on the state of the learn startup movement:
– Startups have gone global, breaking the mold of the traditional startup
– Recommended reading: Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Lean Startup
– Five principles: entrepreneurs are everywhere, entrepreneurship is management, validated learning, build-measure-learn, innovation accounting
– Entrepreneurship has become way too cool – winter is coming, entrepreneurs have to become less cool
– Entrepreneurship is not cool, it’s not just hanging-out drinking beer and creating exciting things, it’s a lot of hard work, struggle, etc.
– All startups can be seen as a story in three acts
– The new question for startups is not can it be built, but should it be built
– Still a lot of experimentation, trying new things and learning from what you try
– Pivot: change directions but stay grounding in what we’ve learned
– Achieving failure – successfully executing a bad plan
– If you’re building something nobody wants, what does it matter if you accomplish it
– Feedback loop: build, measure, learn
– How do we figure-out what we need to learn as quickly as possible
– Stop wasting people’s time – figure out the right things to build
– Telling a new startup to focus is like telling someone who is obese to lose weight (they may know but not know how)
– Innovation Accounting: Establish the baseline, tune the engine, pivot or persevere
– When experiments reach diminishing returns, it’s time to pivot
