The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup has fundamentally changed how entrepreneurs around the world build new businesses. Eric Ries draws on his experience as an entrepreneur and advisor to Silicon Valley startups to present a methodology for developing businesses and products that reduces waste, speeds up learning, and dramatically improves the odds of success.

The core insight of the lean startup methodology is that startups exist not to build products but to learn how to build a sustainable business. Ries introduces the build-measure-learn feedback loop as the fundamental unit of lean startup activity. Rather than executing a long, elaborate plan and hoping it works, startups should identify their riskiest assumptions, build the minimum viable product needed to test those assumptions, measure the results, and learn whether to persevere or pivot.

Ries introduces several powerful concepts that have become standard vocabulary in the startup world, including validated learning, innovation accounting, the minimum viable product, the pivot, and the five whys root-cause analysis technique. He applies Toyota’s lean manufacturing principles — particularly the elimination of waste — to the knowledge economy of software and service startups.

The book is grounded in real examples from Ries’ own startup experiences and those of dozens of companies he has advised. It applies equally to small startups and large corporate innovation labs, making it one of the most universally applicable business books published in the twenty-first century.