Eric Ries

Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, a foundational business text that reshaped how startups approach product development and growth.

Eric Ries published The Lean Startup in 2011, and its influence on the business and technology world has been substantial enough that many of its concepts — minimum viable product, build-measure-learn, validated learning — are now standard vocabulary in startup culture. The book draws on Ries’s own experience as a software entrepreneur and on the lean manufacturing principles developed in the Japanese automotive industry, adapting them for the specific challenges of building new ventures under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

The core argument is that startups fail not primarily because of bad technology but because they build products no one wants, often without testing their assumptions early enough to course-correct before running out of resources. Ries proposes a disciplined, iterative approach in which hypotheses are tested quickly, data is treated as more reliable than intuition, and the definition of progress is fundamentally reimagined around learning rather than feature completion.

The book is not without its critics. Some practitioners argue that the lean methodology can be misapplied to justify shipping half-finished products, and the framework is better suited to some industries than others. Ries also writes in a style that can feel repetitive, revisiting the same case studies multiple times. But as a corrective to the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality that has killed countless startups, The Lean Startup remains one of the most practically useful business books of the past twenty years.