Eric Ries | |
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| Born | September 22, 1978 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Yale University |
| Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur, blogger, author |
Eric Ries (born September 22, 1978) is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author of The Lean Startup , a book on the lean startup movement. He is also the author of The Startup Way, a book on modern entrepreneurial management.
While at Yale, Ries co-founded Catalyst Recruiting, an online forum for university students to network with potential employers. [1] [2] He took a leave of absence to pursue Catalyst Recruiting, but the company soon folded. [1]
After graduating, Ries moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 as a software engineer with There, Inc. [1] He worked with the firm until the 2003 launch of its web-based 3D Virtual World product, There.com. [1] The company soon failed. [1]
In 2004, Ries left to join one of the founders of There.com, Will Harvey in co-founding IMVU Inc., [3] a social network. [4] IMVU investor Steve Blank insisted that IMVU executives audit Blank's class on entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. [5] There Ries picked up Blank's method of fast customer feedback, which Blank called "customer development", and applied it at IMVU in combination with lean software development, testing alternate versions of the product and measuring download rates. [5] IMVU deployed code to production nearly 50 times a day, an unusually rapid development cycle. [2] [6] Ries also copyedited an early version of Blank's book on customer development, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. [7] : i
IMVU aimed to integrate instant messaging with the high revenue per customer of traditional video games. [3] Ries and Harvey did not seek a large amount of initial funding and released a minimum viable product [8] within six months. [3] In 2006, the firm raised $1 million in its first round of venture fundraising from the Seraph Group, eventually raising an additional 18 million. [9] In 2008 after a new CEO joined IMVU, Ries stepped down as CTO, remaining as a board observer. [10] [11] [12]
After leaving IMVU, Ries joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a venture advisor, and six months later started advising startups independently. [5] Based on his experiences, he developed a methodology based on select management principles to help startups succeed. [11] The lean startup methodology originates from a combination of ideas such as lean manufacturing, which seeks to increase value-creating practices and eliminate wasteful practices, [13] [3] [14] and Steve Blank's customer development methodology.
In 2008, Ries began to document the lean startup methodology on his blog with a post titled "The lean startup". [15]
He was invited to speak at the Web 2.0 Expo by Tim O'Reilly, and was offered a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School. [5] Ries began to devote all of his time to the lean startup movement, and held conferences, gave talks, wrote blog entries, and served as an advisor to companies. [10] [14]
In 2015, he released The Leader's Guide, a self-published version of the curriculum used in his consulting work, exclusively through Kickstarter, raising $588,903 for its publication. [16] [17] In October 2017, he released a follow-up book, The Startup Way, which shows the application of entrepreneurial principles in larger corporate environments. [18] Sales of The Startup Way were not as strong as Ries' preceding book The Lean Startup. [19]
In 2015, Ries began organizing The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), which is building a new US stock exchange that aims to align the interests of companies and long-term investors and improve the public company experience. [20] Ries had proposed the idea of the LTSE in his book The Lean Startup. [20] On November 30, 2018, LTSE filed an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission for registration as a national securities exchange. [21] On May 10, 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the Long-Term Stock Exchange as a national securities exchange. [22] [23]
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Co. Ltd is a state-owned joint-stock commercial bank, established in 1993, with its headquarters located in Shanghai.
A series A round is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchange for their investment. It is usually the first series of stock after the common stock and common stock options issued to company founders, employees, friends and family and angel investors.
IMVU is an online virtual world and social networking site. IMVU was founded in 2004 and was originally backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, AllegisCyber Capital, Bridgescale Partners, and Best Buy Capital. IMVU members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create, and play games. In 2014, IMVU had approximately six million active players, and had the largest virtual goods catalog of more than 6 million items as of 2011. The business was previously located in Mountain View, California. It was known as one of the leading practitioners of the lean startup approach.
Steve Blank is an American entrepreneur, educator, author and speaker based in Pescadero, California.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
Lean enterprise is a practice focused on value creation for the end customer with minimal waste and processes. The term has historically been associated with lean manufacturing and Six Sigma due to lean principles being popularized by Toyota in the automobile manufacturing industry and subsequently the electronics and internet software industries.
An entrepreneurial ecosystems or entrepreneurship ecosystems are peculiar systems of interdependent actors and relations directly or indirectly supporting the creation and growth of new ventures.
Cyriac Roeding is a Silicon Valley-based German-American entrepreneur and investor. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Earli, an early cancer detection and treatment firm based in Redwood City, California. Earli is based on Synthetic Biopsy technology from Stanford University, and is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Casdin Capital, Sands Capital, Menlo Ventures, ZhenFund (China) and Marc Benioff. Roeding is also a co-founder and chairman of the board of Rewind Co., a diabetes type 2 reversal company. Roeding's venture investing focuses on AI, brain-to-machine interfaces, consumer businesses, biology meeting software and engineering, and consumer robotics. He served as EVP at Paramount Global / CBS, where he started the division CBS Mobile and brought it to profitability, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins and its iFund with Apple Inc., where he co-founded and led mobile shopping app shopkick with $22M of venture capital to a $250M cash acquisition by SK Telecom/SK Planet and 20 million users. Shopkick rewards users for just walking into retail stores such as Target Corporation, Best Buy, Macy's and Walmart and engaging with products from Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, L'Oreal etc., driving over $1B in sales annually for its partners. Fast Company ranked shopkick one of the world's 10 Most Innovative Companies In Retail, alongside Apple and Starbucks, and Entrepreneur Magazine placed Roeding on its cover.
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is a commercial bank division of First Citizens BancShares. The bank was previously the primary subsidiary of SVB Financial Group, a publicly traded bank holding company that had offices in 15 U.S. states and over a dozen international jurisdictions.
Alphabet Energy was a startup company founded in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley by thermoelectrics expert Matthew L. Scullin and Peidong Yang. The company uses nanotechnology and materials science applications to create thermoelectric generators that are more cost effective than previous bismuth telluride-based devices. The company is based in Hayward, California. It started with a license to use silicon nanowire developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They moved from UC Berkeley to offices in San Francisco in 2011, and later to Hayward.
Product/market fit, also known as product-market fit, is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.
Customer development is a formal methodology for building startups and new corporate ventures. It is one of the three parts that make up a lean startup.
eShares, Inc., doing business as Carta, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software. The company digitizes paper stock certificates along with stock options, warrants, and derivatives to allow companies, investors, and employees to manage their equity and track company ownership. The company also operates CartaX, a private stock exchange.
MACH37 is an American startup accelerator that was established in 2013 as a division of the Virginia-based Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) with funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2017 CIT partnered with VentureScope, a strategic innovation consultancy and venture firm, to revamp MACH37's operating model and curriculum. Following a successful partnership between CIT and VentureScope, MACH37 became fully owned and operated by VentureScope in 2020. MACH37 focuses primarily on honing and strengthening startups' product-market fit through extensive customer discovery and market research, expanding emerging companies' professional networks, fostering founder wellbeing, and providing emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry with access to investment capital and an immediate customer base. In an October 2020 article Forbes named MACH37 'the Granddaddy' of top cyber accelerators giving a nod to the fact that MACH37 was one of the first accelerators in the world dedicated to cyber and cyber adjacent technologies, and it has lasted far longer than many of its peer accelerators while strengthening over time. The name 'MACH37' is a reference to the escape velocity of Earth's atmosphere. VentureScope applies Lean Startup methodology at MACH37 as an efficient and successful approach to assist startups to rapidly adapt their search for a successful business model and test their hypotheses about customer needs and market demands.
The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) is an SEC-registered national securities exchange built to serve companies and investors who share a long-term vision.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.
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