The Lean Startup Talk at Stanford E-Corner

Debunking Myths of Entrepreneurship

A startup is not a "doll house" version of a larger enterprise. Its a human institution trying to start something new under extreme conditions of uncertainty, says author Eric Ries. Its not that some founders have better ideas than others, and this is what dictates success. What differentiates a successfully launched enterprise is one who can unearth the best ideas under duress - those who can find "the pivot"- the point of reinvention when they realize that their original ideas need retooling. And, more critically, that they can find their market before they run out of money.

Over 9 lectures and 1.5 hours of content!

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.

He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.