The Lean Startup

How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

By: Eric Ries

Narrated by: Eric Ries

Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning”, rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product-development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

©2011 Eric Ries (P)2011 Random House

Critic reviews

"Eric has created a science where previously there was only art. A must read for every serious entrepreneur—and every manager interested in innovation." (Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Opsware Inc., and Netscape)

"At Asana, we've been lucky to benefit from Eric's advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business." (Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and Asana)

"In business, a ‘lean’ enterprise is sustainable efficiency in action. Eric Ries’ revolutionary Lean Startup method will help bring your new business idea to an end result that is successful and sustainable. You’ll find innovative steps and strategies for creating and managing your own startup while learning from the real-life successes and collapses of others. This book is a must read for entrepreneurs who are truly ready to start something great!” (Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur.)

Great life changing book!!

Thank you Eric for writing this amazing life - changing book ! ! ! !

Great book for start ups both big and small

I really liked the broad application of the lean start up principles. Eric did an amazing job with this concept. Very inspiring as an entrepreneur. Bravo!

Good book all around.

Would you consider the audio edition of The Lean Startup to be better than the print version?

This is the best bsusiness book I've read here out of twelve or so total books.

A very informative book.

The concepts were narrated with a good understanding. Emphasis, speed and diction in general helped highlight points of interest.
I learnt a lot from this book.

Interesting and new content

I enjoyed the content and the decision making explained in this book and look forward to implementing in my company. My only recommendation is to have more stories to explain the desogn of the lean startup. There were definitely some good ones but I found it could do with more.

Has something interesting to think of

At first I struggled to finish this book but the middle part is much more interesting than the beginning. Chapter 13 is pure author's view on our future as a society - good dreams but unlikely to come true.
Overall, it worth reading/listening but it is not so exciting as other startup books (better listen to Thiel's "Zero to One").

My lean reading experience

I was there till the end. however, after chapter 8 I felt things were starting to repeat themselves..

An antidote for big idea investing

This book is good because it gives entrepreneurs and Angel Investors a frame work for taking an entrepreneur'' insight/inspiration and turning it into a product or service with paying customers. As a former PE investor, I find angel investors and entrepreneurs too focussed on technology and team and not enough on sales and customer experience. By focussing on concurrent product and customer development/feedback, teams are more likely to find a solution and paying customers before they exhaust their money and credibility with investors.

Muy bueno.

Me costó terminarlo pero es genial. Poner mucha atención para no perderse. De verdad genial.

for startups? all cases mentioned are corporations

narrator often speaks in that overly polished way that is just unctuous. despite a message of creating clarity and not wasting people's time, his message is often obscured by management jargon. it's incredible how insidious language like that is, in that it still hobbled a book the very existence of which was designed to cut through the crap.
and, incredibly, almost all cases he ever mentions in the book are not of startups, but his large corporate clients who are betting on certain internal teams to maybe act like startups. the exception is his own startup, In View.
that said, for many of the times I had a nagging issue with something he said, I noticed that he often addressed that question at some point.