Eric Ries

Google maintained great culture, great leadership, and great intentions yet still lost key innovation capability. Decisions gradually shifted from customer benefit to company benefit to personal benefit of the decision maker. The resulting loss of the transformer invention exceeds the scale of Kodak missing digital cameras in corporate value destruction.

One former employee with 13 years at Google described the progression. The transformer technology that is the basis of all modern LLMs was invented at Google. Not a single one of the co-authors commercialized the transformer at Google. Every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere. Companies with hundreds of billions of dollars of valua

Eric says that when you see what's actually going on in the most iconic startups you can think of, you realize there's dysfunctions and problems everywhere. Everyone's simply projecting a misleading positive image.

There is an entire industry that creates beautiful, entertaining stories about startups and their founders. Their content creates a very warped and inaccurate version of reality, dangerously misrepresenting what it takes to start a successful company.

Do not take feedback personally, instead accept it and analyze it with an understanding that anything being said is packaged with the person's emotions and interpretation of context.

Often times even the geniuses in Silicon Valley don't know how great of a product they have until it is beyond popular.

During the early days of Facebook, for example, the founders were busy working on side projects, even as users were breaking down the front door asking to be let onto the platform. The first version of Instagram was a massive failure. The list is long.

Once the product is popular though, the geniuses can do a lot of things wrong and still succeed because the core of their success is so strong, it cannot fail.

Eric Ries tells James Beshara that students he teaches keep asking why he never mentioned pivots, even though pivots are most of what he talks about. Entrepreneurship, he says, is learning by doing. He uses The Inner Game of Tennis: you cannot learn the game from a book, you have to swing the racket. Books and theory still help, but only when they meet lived experience. Otherwise they do not change how you act or help you find anything new. Ries says he can describe the startup roller coaster calmly only because he has ridden the climb himself, not because someone explained it to him.

Eric Ries exposes his team to the entire startup roller-coaster, successes or failures, to clearly explain that his team is all they've got. There is no one to come to the rescue, and their future is entirely in their own hands.

Not only does it help him emotionally, but it gives the team insight into their own journey, and creates much smoother pivots, when those inevitably happen. Instead of wondering why, the team can look back at their journey and see how their own decisions have led to the outcomes.

Startups are challenging both physically and emotionally and it is important to learn not to freak out. The most challenging situation for you might end up creating a strong company, but that won't become apparent till after the fact.

To survive entrepreneurship, founders have to understand that emotional roller-coaster is coming, expect it, and work through it. After all, startups are limited liability companies for a reason, and even if the business fails, everything else will be okay.

Eric Ries has a very challenging situation with his company where the whole venture was on a brink of going extinct. He had hard time sleeping, felt constantly "high" on the adrenaline fight-or-flight response, experience trouble eating, he even broke down crying while meditating ... you name it. Turns out, stress can have a really profound effect on your body, and this is not uncommon.

You cannot be an early adopter if a product is flawless and polished. They can go from your most fierce critics to your most passionate defenders. Some feel as if they have ownership of your product— like they built it— while your company is the handyman doing their work.

They are harmful because they betray trust between you and your team. You have to be honest about why the deadline matters and why you care in order to build stronger trust. If you have the choice between a decision and time, choose time.

On Below the Line with James Beshara, Eric Ries calls the fundamental attribution error a well-documented bias. When someone else does something, we explain it by who they are, not by the circumstances. When we do the same thing, we explain it by the circumstances. If he snaps at a person, he wants that read as a bad day. If someone snaps at him, he decides that is simply their character. We play judge, jury, and executioner for other people, he says, and we want clemency for ourselves. Putting a name on the error is useful because, once you see it, you stop treating other people's worst moments as their whole personality.

Equanimity is his go-to for all things entrepreneurship. For him, in order to survive as a founder, you have to practice some form of non-attachment.

There is no such thing as an overnight success, and startups often take 10+ years before they get to a milestone deemed successful by the outsiders. At the same time, this idea that it takes years to achieve success discourages pivots, and often traps founders who are working on "zombie startups," from achieving greatness on another idea.

It’s called toxic founder image. Founders want to appear as winners at all times, which prevents them from seeking for help because it could be viewed as a sign of weakness. Investors, on the other hand, eager to help founders who are struggling, also don't want to offer help because that would mean admitting that companies are not doing well. Meanwhile, everyone is comparing their performance to each other, creating a vicious cycle.

On Below the Line with James Beshara, Eric Ries says case studies, magazine profiles, and movies mislead people who actually start companies. He names The Social Network and Ghostbusters. In Ghostbusters, the founders are thrown out of a university lab, take out a loan, and spend the money on advertising and technology before they have customers. They are down to the last dollar of petty cash when the first customer walks in. Ries says real life is not darkest before the dawn. It is darkest before you go out of business. The film saves the company from having no customers, and not because the founders did the selling, marketing, and customer development a real startup has to do.

Eric says that being a founder is not something he enjoys, necessarily, but the desire to make change in the world is what drives him to be a founder. It is a powerful, exhilarating, and rewarding career, unlike any other kind of work.

Burt Blackarach tells James Beshara that he used to take every reaction into his body, good or bad, until he had to start over. He credits Don Miguel Ruiz's book The Four Agreements: do not take it personally. If someone says you are wonderful or says you are awful, they are often reflecting their own feelings, including jealousy. Beshara ties that to advice from Eric Ries, that feedback, including praise, usually says more about the speaker than about you. He remembers feeling unprotected at his company Tilt, on a visit to the Toronto office, as if any comment could wound him because he cared too much what people thought.