Eric Ries
1 book analyzed
Biography
Eric Ries (born 1978) is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author who cofounded IMVU, a 3D avatar-based social network, in 2004. The experience of building IMVU — particularly the painful discovery that many of the product decisions were based on untested assumptions — became the foundation for the lean startup methodology. Ries studied computer science at Yale and was influenced by the Toyota Production System, agile software development, and Steve Blank's customer development model. He began blogging about his emerging methodology in 2008 under the name 'Startup Lessons Learned,' and the blog quickly attracted a following among entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who recognized the problems he was describing. The Lean Startup, published in 2011, synthesized years of blog posts, conference talks, and consulting experience into a coherent framework. It became a New York Times bestseller and spawned a global movement — Lean Startup meetups in over 100 cities, corporate adoption programs at GE and other Fortune 500 companies, and a conference series that drew thousands of attendees. Ries subsequently founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), which received SEC approval in 2019, as a market designed to encourage long-term thinking over short-term financial engineering. This venture reflects his belief that the problems the lean startup addresses — the misallocation of resources under uncertainty — are not limited to startups but are systemic features of modern capitalism.