Introduction

• The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential.
• I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most.
• Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
• We have wildly divergent associations with these two words, entrepreneurship and management.
• We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready.
• We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.
• I am one of those people who grew up programming computers, and so my journey to thinking about entrepreneurship and management has taken a circuitous path. I have always worked on the product development side of my industry; my partners and bosses were managers or marketers,
• Throughout my career, I kept having the experience of working incredibly hard on products that ultimately failed in the marketplace. At first, largely because of my background, I viewed these as technical problems that required technical solutions: better architecture, a better engineering process, better discipline, focus, or product vision.
• the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them.
• Then I started to write, first on a blog called Startup Lessons Learned, and speak—at conferences and to companies, startups, and venture capitalists—to anyone who would listen.
• My hope all along was to find ways to eliminate the tremendous waste I saw all around me: startups that built products nobody wanted, new products pulled from the shelves, countless dreams unrealized.
• to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide.
• The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
• believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth.
• Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
• The first problem is the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy, and thorough market research.
• Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.
• Most people think of process and management as boring and dull, whereas startups are dynamic and exciting. But what is actually exciting is to see startups succeed and change the world.
• The passion, energy, and vision that people bring to these new ventures are resources too precious to waste.