This was an amazing episode, Lenny! As a new founder, Eric’s advice is so real and relatable even 10 years after the Lean Startup. Thank you for this incredible content!
Great to hear considerations around ethics, it truly is a very important topic. Eric is a wonderful speaker and thinker, I'm really glad to have someone like him be a strong voice in the industry. Thanks for the episode, Lenny!
I just want to say this was a fabulous interview. I’d also like to mention the intellectual progenitor to Ries’ book, Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal - written at the depths of Americas manufacturing depression, it showed a way out. A great read, written as a novel.
@@LennysPodcast Steve Blank definitely deserves to be on the podcast as he is a professor of Eric and actually invented the Lean Startup. His customer development is tremendously useful for PMs and founders. Alexander Osterwalder should be here too as he invented the business canvas, another great framework for founders and PMs to look at businesses as a whole, not just the product piece. In short, lean has 3 components: 1, Customer development - Steve Blank 2, Agile engineering / MVP - Eric Ries 3, Business Canvas - Alexander Osterwalder
Lenny, you are crushing it. You’re very skilled in listening and not interrupting. I love hearing this brain dumps from these people! I’ve also been binging your newsletter. Just too much great content coming from you 😂
It’s not minimum that’s fluid, it’s viable that is a modifier of minimum. It’s the minimum that is still viable. And that depends on the user, the job, the context, the hypothesis, etc.
dr. Russell Ackoff in the 80's already was telling business managers that the goal of any business is not to make money, but to develop and bring value to society. I don't know if Eric even knows, but basically Lean and Agile methodologies are rooted in System Thinking principles, where Russel Ackoff was on of the fathers. Unfortunately, along the way we lost that knowledge and became more interested in slogans and names to give to things. It's natural, that as we get older and we see that society is not evolving, we start to think that we need to change something 😉
and all of these things are rooted back to first principles thinking. first principles thinking is all you need. but very few people bother to strip away the BS and get the fundamentals.
Just rewatching this again -- the part about the mental health crisis, and I actually wrote about Hsieh's death immediately after Forbes published a scathing article about him. Not one publication, even all the ones I have relationships with, wouldn't publish it. It really made me upset, because someone should rectify that visionary's ending. Here's the unpublished g-doc. I even interviewed psychologists to analyze the situation. Forbes didn't interview one. And in fact, they flat out lied about speaking with his Zappos co-founder. I know because messaged him and asked. He said he didn't speak to anyone about it. Anyway, here's the link, it literally details why the Hsieh incident isn't the full story you got. And it kills me how people who are supposed to be reputable journalists, like Kara Swisher, shared clickbait links to the Forbes article with lambasting headlines of Tony. If she was actually fair and unbiased, like journalists are supposed to be, she would've dug even the least bit below the surface to see what the actual issues were. And Jewel... Don't get even me started on that press-hungry, one-hit wonder. I mean look at the negative tweets about Tony -- from people who just read the Forbes article and took it at face value. Re-reading the tweets gets me heated to this day. And this happened years ago. docs.google.com/document/d/11A7zk0ao8U-CleuqBHlk0XkNGAau71pI4gwkSZIoNzM/edit?usp=sharing
The concept of MVP may be flexible for software development. But this concept sets up the constraints hard to pivot later for industries where expensive infrastructure has to be invested to even make that MVP. I think the adoption of MVP for physical manufacturing startups is damaging.
Unless I'm building for colleagues on the same floor, building something new for strangers using feedback is something I grok but find very hard to do. It reminds me of investing, how it's so easy (continually buy cheapest SP500 passive fund every month for your whole life), and I yet cannot do it (stock picking). I've sat and thought deeply about why this is. It's rooted in my psyche and I think it is profound insecurity. It stops me seeking feedback. I wonder if this is why Americans do well at startups (and broadcasting themselves). It feels to me that Americans, for many reasons, have a little less self-doubt and fewer insecurities. Or perhaps they're more permissive, less judgemental, have looser social norms (see Michele Gelfand's tightness-looseness theory) which make it bit easier to fail. My point is that I think to build something people want means reading Eric Ries, and then getting counselling for why you're scared of people. This doesn't get talked about and yet I bet it's main the reason the startup graveyard is full.
*37:42** (and very context specific. Essentially, the message isn't, build something low quality and simple.)* ^^IDEA: I think Eric should make a YT show where he rates MVPs, and gives them the direct feedback they need to hear. He's funny and to the point. And he's likable so trolls will be less likely to attack, but you never know -- I rarely ever read the comments, unless I'm ready to dive into a mental breakdown. Lol #theinternetisscary #itusedtobemagical
I appreciate your take, but I have a different perspective-another quality ep by Lenny. There is good history, wisdom, and insights here-just my two cents.
