Eric Ries
Author of the Lean Startup
Discussion
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Eric Ries
@ericries
Hi everyone, I'm Eric. Author of The Lean Startup. here. I'm excited to be answering your questions today, so please fire away.
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Startup L. Jackson
@startupljackson · Social Media Expert
@ericries You've been iterating on Lean Startup for a number of years now. You seem to have moved up market from startups to enterprises. Was that a function of finding product-market fit there and were startups the wrong customers? Why the shift?
@startupljackson It's an honor to have the one and only SLJ here, if for not other reason than this proves that we're not the same person and people can stop asking me about it. (Although, to be honest, I'm flattered)
If you look at the adoption of Lean Startup, and the people interested in it, it's still massively heavily weighted towards startups and not enterprise. but I do think your observation is right that a lot of us in the community have been talking about enterprise adoption a lot lately. If we're being really honest, that's partly because there are now a large number of Lean Startup consultants, and that's where the money is.
But I actually don't believe there's a big a distinction between "enterprise" Lean Startup and "startup" Lean Startup. In fact, I think that false dichotomy gets a lot of people in trouble. If you really take seriously the idea that startups are designed for hypergrowth, than once they have any kind of success, they will have "enterprise" problems. And if you take seriously the idea that 21st century capitalism is all about dynamism and change, then there can't really be "one true best" structure or management system. Every company is going to have to keep evolving. To sloganize it with horrible jargon: continuous innovation via continuous transformtion.
So, if you follow all that, you'll see that there's no way to have a management philosophy like Lean Startup if you can't answer to key questions:
1. How do we scale this past a single cohesive small team?
2. How do we adopt new practices across the company in order to continually improve?
A lot of founders I know, even ones that were super psyched about Lean Startup five years ago, have gotten back in touch to ask for my help now that they are past product/market fit. In a lot of cases, they want to know how to keep the startup energy they had in the early years now that they are larger. How do they prevent bureaucracy from setting in? How do they teach their employees to act in a more entrepreneurial way? How can they build a company that they themselves would want to work at?
So, that's why my thinking has been drawn to those questions. I view it as a necessary evolution of the philosophy as the community grows.
Or maybe it's because it's a problem I get paid to think about.
Startup L. Jackson
@startupljackson · Social Media Expert
@ericries following up on that, LS is a methodology that speaks to how to discover and address customer problems. This seems to be universal, in terms of applying to organizations at any stage. That said, a small organization and a large organization presumably have much different organizational contexts. Startups have the benefit of having no incumbent revenue, efficient communication channels (we're all in one room), tend to be risk seeking, etc. While big orgs have other advantages, they tend to bias against innovation structurally.
How do we structure teams in 100 person+ organizations to afford innovation, bubble up that innovation to leadership, and encourage scaling (as opposed to smothering) of ideas that achieve product-market fit but aren't meaningful to today's bottom line?
@startupljackson those are questions I think will take an entire book to answer. if you look at the "small organization context" features you mention: no incumbent revenue, efficient comms, risk seeking what I find so striking is how early in a startup's life those contexts start to disappear. Already at 50 people, communication and coordination overhead is polynomially higher, so we start to build silo'd departments. Already at $10MM run rate, there's substantial loss aversion, and we see product managers making more conservative choices. And on and on. So my focus right now is: how do we build a management system that is adaptive enough so that we can enjoy that positive context throughout the whole life of the company, not just in the early days. And I do believe it is possible, but it requires that founders and leaders really shift their own behavior and management style.
Ovi Negrean
@ovinegrean · Founder @SocialBeeHQ, @getnuggetapp
Hey @ericries - I am a fan of the Lean methodology and of your book.
I would be interested in getting your view on Peter Thiel's - Zero to One
.
Do you feel that the Zero to One approach that is stating that sometimes you can't just start with an MVP and the Lean way are opposing methodologies, or that they can actually build one on top of the other?
@ovinegrean I've read Z2O and seen Peter interviewed about it many times. He and I have talked about our differences many times. And, to be honest, I still don't really understand the point of disagreement. Many of the examples he cites positively (like Facebook and Paypal) seem like they followed lean startup principles like MVPs and pivots to the letter. In fact, a lot of my own thinking has been influenced by studying those case studies in the first place.
I do think that part of the challenge in being a well-known contrarian is that you have to come to new ideas pretty early. once they are already popular, you can't really be a contrarian and adopt them any more. it's not like Peter is resigning from the Facebook board because it's no longer contrarian to want to be there ;)
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Hey, Eric! Glad to have you here and I'm even more excited to speak at the Lean Startup Conference in November (plug!) as someone that attended three years ago.
If you were to stop what you're doing now and found a new startup, what problem would you solve?
@rrhoover welcome back! we're psyched to have you. No better feeling than when an attendee goes on to become a rock star.
this isn't a hypothetical question (other than the stopping part). I'm working on a startup called the Long-Term Stock Exchange. Trying to solve the problem of excess short-termism on the part of public investors & managers. I think that's one of the biggest problems messing up not just the startup ecosystem but our whole global economy. I don't have a lot to share about it right now, but stay tuned.
Alex Devkar
@alexdevkar
Hi Eric, what are the most common mistakes/misunderstandings/misapplications you see startups make in applying the Lean methodology?
@alexdevkar most common is thinking that Lean means you don't need a vision: http://www.startuplessonslearned...
Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
Hey Eric - Thanks for joining us.
If you were writing the Lean Startup in 2015, what would you add to it?
Morgan Beller
@beller · Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
@eriktorenberg, alley-oop: You can make an argument that your book is more relevant now than ever - recent discussions on high burn, etc. Do you plan to come out with a sequel? And if so, ____ (see Erik's question above)
@eriktorenberg Glad to be here - big fan (as you know)
One of my big takeaways of the past five years is how much detail is required to adopt Lean Startup at scale. It's not enough to put up posters and slogans on the wall, fun as that is sometimes. In the book I make a lot of sweeping statements about what you need to do, and in a lot of cases what I've realized is that those statements are just the tip of the iceberg. In several places I cover in one paragraph topics that I think could be a whole book.
@beller Yes, working on it as we speak. A little bit of detail is available here: https://www.kickstarter.com/proj...
Morgan Beller
@beller · Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
@ericries - can't wait to read it!
Aaron Gopp
@aaron_gopp · co-founder Triipmates
Hi @ericries, thank you for taking the time to jam with us today! Like many people here, my introduction to the startup community was “The Lean Startup”. It is an amazing framework to assist in building a revolutionary company, however, there are quite a few terms that have become buzzwords and are often times misunderstood… “pivot” and “MVP” immediately come to mind. They are important concepts but part of a bigger methodology. Does it worry you that many startup founders are spending a lot of time “building MVPs” and “pivoting” without understanding what they mean and their role? How do you help to convey the value of these concepts as part of the bigger picture?
@aaron_gopp it used to bother me a great deal. TechCrunch declared "pivot" officially overused before, as far as I can tell, they ever learned to use it correctly: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/03...
now I don't mind so much. It's like any new idea or concept. There's going to be a lot of BS out there, but all that matter is: is the core community of people who really get it growing & having an impact? If so, ignore the hype.
Tom Redman
@redman · Technical Product Manager, Buffer
@ericries Hi Eric, thank you so much for the AMA and the Lean Startup. I'm reading it again right now and have recommended it to several people. I recently watched Peter Thiel's lecture in Sam Altman's Stanford "startup class", and he mentioned that he's skeptical about lean methodologies in general, that the biggest "monopoly" startups do something truly novel that couldn't be achieved by only talking with customers.
I was a bit surprised (for some reason, I think of lean startup as universally accepted theory), but I was immediately curious about what your thoughts on that perspective might be? Is he right?
Found the quote from Peter Thiel:
"I am personally quite skeptical of all of the lean startup methodologies. I think the really great companies did something that is more of a quantum improvement that really differentiated them from everybody else. They typically did not do massive customer surveys. ... I do think we're way too focused on iteration as a modality and not enough on trying to have a virtual ESP link with the public and figuring it out ourselves. ... I think it's often the case that you don't have the time to mitigate the risk. If you take the time to figure out what people want, you risk missing the boat on something."
@redman I already addressed this earlier. The mention of "customer surveys" is the giveaway that we're talking past each other. Lean Startup is vehemently opposed to surveys & (in general) to asking what customers want. Your question prompted me to grab a copy of the book off my shelf; I was curious on what page I cover this topic first. On page 4 (!) I wrote: "we often talked to them and asked them for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said ... we were much more likely to experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims." So anyone who's read at least the first 4 pages of The Lean Startup should know at least that much.
PS. Anytime I have to go back and read my own writing, I cringe. What was I thinking? that's the glamorous life of an author :)
Eric Willis
@erictwillis · Working on something new
@ericries Hello, Eric. Thanks for doing the AMA. Your Kickstarter campaign was very successful. Congrats. I have a two questions related to it. What was the most important lesson you learned from the campaign and what would you do differently with the campaign if you could do it all over again?
@erictwillis Kickstarter was a huge amount of fun - and also a giant amount of work. One big lesson I learned is that even on a successful campaign, people can find an awful lot to complain about. It's just the law of large numbers, I guess. Have enough backers and even a small % of vocal critics can really get you down. I wish I'd realized that was going to happen so I could have prepared myself emotionally for it.
In terms of what to do again, I didn't realize how many people would be backing a campaign like this for the first time. So I wish I had done more education about how crowdfunding works, what to expect, what a KS "survey" is, etc.
Jeff Needles
@jsneedles · BI @ Meerkat & Maker of Things
@ericries Hey Eric, thanks for taking the time! What is the fastest you've every seen anyone take the lean startup methodology and turn it into a successful business? Any examples? How about companies that were overzealous and failed because of it?
@jsneedles I don't like to name names and cite specific companies. I'd rather let them speak for themselves. We regularly feature both kinds of stories at the Lean Startup Conference, and we post the videos for free on youtube. Take a look and decide for yourself which companies really used the method.