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.
Video Eric Ries
Early life
While at Yale, he was co-founder of Catalyst Recruiting, an online forum for university students to network with potential employers; . He took a leave of absence to pursue Catalyst Recruiting, but the company soon folded.
Maps Eric Ries
Career
IMVU
After graduating, Ries moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 as a software engineer with There, Inc. He worked with the firm until the 2003 launch of its web-based 3D Virtual World product, There.com. The company soon failed
In 2004, Ries left to join one of the founders of There.com, Will Harvey in co-founding IMVU Inc., a social network. IMVU investor Steve Blank, who insisted that IMVU executives audit his class on entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. There he picked up Blank's method of fast customer feedback, which Blank called "Customer Development", and applied it at IMVU, testing alternate versions of the product and measuring download rates. IMVU deployed code to production nearly 50 times a day, an unusually rapid development cycle.
IMVU aimed to integrate instant messaging with the high revenue per customer of traditional video games. Ries and Harvey did not seek a large amount of initial funding and released a minimum viable product within six months. In 2006, the firm raised $1 million in its first round of venture fundraising from the Seraph Group, eventually raising an additional 18 million. In 2008 after a new CEO joined IMVU, Ries stepped down as CTO, remaining as a Board Observer.
Lean startup
After leaving IMVU, Ries joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a venture advisor, and six months later started advising startups independently. Based on his experiences, he developed a methodology based on select management principles to help startups succeed. The Lean Startup philosophy originates from the Japanese concept of lean manufacturing, which seeks to increase value-creating practices and eliminate wasteful practices.
In 2011, Ries began to document his philosophy on his blog with a post titled "The lean startup."
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. Ries began to devote all of his time to The Lean Startup project, and held conferences, gave talks, wrote blog entries, and served as an advisor to companies.
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. In October 2017, he released a follow-up, The Startup Way (Currency, Penguin Random House) which shows the application of Lean in larger, corporate environments.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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