Top 100 Eric Ries Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.”

— Eric Ries

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Strategy Quotes

2. “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.”

— Eric Ries

3. “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”

— Eric Ries

4. “Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.”

— Eric Ries

5. “If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”

— Eric Ries

6. “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”

— Eric Ries

7. “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

— Eric Ries

8. “As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.”

— Eric Ries

9. “Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”

— Eric Ries

10. “The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

— Eric Ries

11. “Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.”

— Eric Ries

12. “The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.”

— Eric Ries

13. “In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.”

— Eric Ries

14. “Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.”

— Eric Ries

15. “What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?”

— Eric Ries

16. “Reading is good, action is better.”

— Eric Ries

17. “When in doubt, simplify.”

— Eric Ries

18. “In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.”

— Eric Ries

Featured in: Growth Quotes

19. “Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.”

— Eric Ries

20. “The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.”

— Eric Ries

21. “If you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know what quality is.”

— Eric Ries

22. “Better to have bad news that’s true than good news we made up.”

— Eric Ries

23. “A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.”

— Eric Ries

24. “The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.”

— Eric Ries

25. “The Toyota Way.”

— Eric Ries

26. “Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.”

— Eric Ries

27. “This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”

— Eric Ries

28. “The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.”

— Eric Ries

29. “If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed – at seeing what happens – but won’t necessarily gain validated learning – If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”

— Eric Ries

30. “Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.”

— Eric Ries

31. “Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.”

— Eric Ries

32. “Learning to see waste and then systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries.”

— Eric Ries

33. “The critical first question for any lean transformation is: which activities create value and which are a form of waste? Once.”

— Eric Ries

34. “The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.”

— Eric Ries

35. “Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.”

— Eric Ries

36. “Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.”

— Eric Ries

37. “Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.”

— Eric Ries

38. “The biggest start-up successes – from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg – were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.”

— Eric Ries

39. “Failure is a prerequisite to learning.”

— Eric Ries

40. “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” To answer those questions, we need a method for systematically breaking down a business plan into its component parts and testing each part empirically.”

— Eric Ries

41. “Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.”

— Eric Ries

42. “All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.”

— Eric Ries

43. “Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.”

— Eric Ries

44. “There is a reason all past management revolutions have been led by engineers: management is human systems engineering.”

— Eric Ries

45. “The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.”

— Eric Ries

46. “If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?”

— Eric Ries

47. “The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.”

— Eric Ries

48. “Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.”

— Eric Ries

49. “Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it’s not having an idea, it’s not being in the right place at the right time. It’s fundamentally company building.”

— Eric Ries

50. “If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.”

— Eric Ries