Eric Ries
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). He’s also a multi-time founder and currently advises startups, VC firms, and larger companies on business and product strategy.
AI & Technology Skills
AI's primary impact on organizations is its ability to summarize information and expand an individual's span of control.
"AI is a management technology. The thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences... It will really change management a lot because it changes the individual span of control quite a lot."
Career Skills
A pivot is a strategic shift that maintains the original vision while changing the path to get there.
"pivot is defined as a change in strategy without a change in vision. So we have this idea that the founder has the vision, then they try to figure out how to make the vision happen and they find a dif..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Testing a candidate's understanding of the limitations of 'best practices' reveals their depth of experience and critical thinking.
"My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career... and then you'd be like, 'Great. Tell me a situation where that best practic..."
Trust is built through structural governance and legal commitments, not just founder intentions.
"If you want your organization to be trustworthy... you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself so that even if you weren't there the promise would be kept."
Leadership Skills
The need for a pivot is usually felt before it is admitted; use time-boxed experiments to force a decision.
"If you're asking whether you should pivot or not you probably know the answer already... give yourself a fixed period of time to take some decisive action and see if it feels better."
Product Management Skills
Use low-fidelity artifacts like brochures to validate problem-solution fit before investing in expensive R&D.
"I convinced them, instead of paying three years and $18 million, so you don't make the thing, let's go take a brochure, take it to some customers... customers laughed them out of the room and it was n..."
An MVP is a validation tool for a specific hypothesis, not just a low-quality version of a product.
"MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether a hypothesis is true or not?"
Founders consistently overestimate what is 'minimum' for an MVP; aggressive cutting is required to reach a true baseline.
"The first tip is, write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP. Cut it in half and cut it in half again and build that. Honestly, if you just do that, that's really not that bad."
Coherent product design requires a single 'Chief Engineer' who has the moral authority to make final trade-off decisions.
"The most important thing you have to do in a product is make trade-off decisions... The idea is like, 'This is the person who makes those.' ... It has to be that you can keep it in somebody's head. So..."