Eric Ries is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author recognized for
pioneering the lean startup movement, a new-business strategy which directs
startup companies to allocate their resources as efficiently as possible. He
is a blogger within the technology entrepreneur community.
Early life In 2001, Ries graduated from Yale
University with a B.S. in Computer Science. As a high schooler, Ries had
published a book called Black Art of Java Game Programming. While at Yale, he
began his entrepreneurial career as the co-founder of Catalyst Recruiting, an
online forum for university students to network with potential employers. During
this time, Ries was also on the advisory board for two startup incubators and a
venture fund in New Haven, Connecticut. He took a leave of absence from his
undergraduate studies to pursue his newly founded company, however, due to a
lack of business experience and the burst of the dot-com bubble, Catalyst
Recruiting folded shortly thereafter. Ries felt he was "lucky that the company
failed soon enough that [he] could do it during a leave of absence," and returned
to Yale to complete his undergraduate degree.
Career After graduating, Ries moved to Silicon
Valley in 2001 to work 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 failed and in 2004, Ries left to start another
company, IMVU Inc. In 2004, Ries joined one of the founders
of There.com, Will Harvey, to co-found IMVU, a 3D social network where users
can maintain personalized avatars, chat, and play games with other users. Through
IMVU, Ries met Steve Blank, a successful serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley
thought leader, and one of IMVU’s investors. In exchange for funding IMVU,
Blank insisted that the top executives audit his class on entrepreneurship at
UC Berkeley. Blank’s emphasis on putting real features in front of customers and
measuring user feedback resonated with Ries, who would use this methodology,
which Blank called "Customer Development", to rapidly develop IMVU’s
products. Customer Development became a cornerstone of the subsequent "Lean
Startup Movement." As Chief Technology Officer, Ries was
charged with writing and overseeing all of the product’s code. He would also
test alternate versions of the product by attracting visitors through Google
AdWords and measuring download rates. Ries would add newly written code into
IMVU’s production cycle nearly 50 times a day, an unusually rapid development
cycle. Since large companies like Microsoft,
Yahoo! and AOL were already participants in the instant messaging market, IMVU’s
goal was to integrate instant messaging’s mass appeal with the high
revenue per customer of traditional video games. Drawing from prior
experience, Ries and Harvey did not seek a large amount of initial funding and
released a minimum viable product with the intention of bettering their product
through continuous customer feedback. Within six months, IMVU was released and
began to receive customers. In 2006, IMVU raised $1 million in its
first round of venture fundraising from the Seraph Group, and would go on to
raise an additional $18 million. During this time, IMVU quickly grew in
membership and popularity, in large part due to the efficiency-oriented
management practices championed by Ries. In 2008 after a new CEO joined IMVU,
Ries stepped down as CTO, remaining as a Board Observer. As of 2011, IMVU has 40
million users and generates $40 million in revenue.
= Lean startup = After leaving IMVU, Ries joined venture
capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a venture advisor, and six months later,
started advising startups independently. Since he had experienced both success
and failure with high-tech startups, Ries began to develop 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. Since production costs and speeds are markedly reduced when
producing and distributing digital goods as compared with their physical
counterparts, Ries applied the lean manufacturing methodology to web-based
technology. In 2008, Ries began receiving requests
to sit on advisory boards to share his experiences. At the suggestion of his
mentors, Ries began to document his philosophy on his blog with a post
titled "The lean startup." Ries 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. Ries is planning to release The Leader's
Guide, a self-published version of the curriculum used in his consulting work
available exclusively through Kickstarter.
References