The Lean Startup

By Eric Ries

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This book has 45 recommendations

Bogdan Iordache (Co-Founder/How to Web)

There are quite a few good business books on technology, and I'll list below some I find to be a good starting point. Personally, I like biographies a lot and I mostly read biographies of dead people, because those are the most honest ones. So because the computer age is still very young, there won't be a lot of biographies in my list.

Dragos Novac (CEO/Nordic 9)

Then, again when I was younger, at the beginning of 2000s, Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and The Cluetrain Manifesto were two pieces of work I’d always refer to, as well as Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, later on when I was looking at how to become a better tech entrepreneur.

Mircea Scarlatescu (Co-Founder/123flori.ro)

Many, but here’s a short list, for both entrepreneurs and team leaders:

The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
ReWork – Jason Fried

Michael Hebenstreit (Founder/MH Themes)

If you want to become an entrepreneur and succeed in a competitive environment, then there are some evergreen books as well, for example: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Sheryl Sandberg (COO/Facebook)

Provides a great inside look at how the tech industry approaches building products and businesses.

Joel Gascoigne (Co-founder/Buffer)

In many ways, Eric Ries and The Lean Startup deserve a lot of the credit for where I am today and for Buffer existing. I first discovered Eric and his Lean Startup concepts via his blog about 5 years ago. He really helped me to understand the idea of validating an idea before spending lots of effort, and the notion of measuring progress in terms of learning rather than lines of code.

The Lean Startup is an incredible handbook for anyone who wants to get their startup off to the very best start possible. It helped me to take Buffer from idea to paying customers in 7 weeks.

Howard Marks (CEO/StartEngine)

I would say The Lean Startup is the one that is very easy to digest and probably has most of the truth that you need to get things off the ground. It really teaches you how to do some experimentation. That was a very good one. [...] If you want to stay small and lean, The Lean Startup is a great place to start.

Mike Benkovich (Founder/Anatomonics)

I'd recommend a sprinkling of business books followed by a heap of productivity and behavioural psychology books. The business books will help you with principals and the psychological books help with everything else in your life. Building your own business can really f!@# you up psychologically.

Louis Nyffenegger (Founder/PentesterLab)

But it's after reading "The Lean Startup" that I really decided to create and sell a service. This book was just the trigger I needed at the right time.

Craig Pearce (Co-Founder/Kid Genius)

If you are reading to learn skills that can be implemented in your startup, I’d recommend The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful by Eric Reis and actually avoid its predecessor The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank until later in your career.

Ashley Hathaway (Enterprise Product Manager)

When it comes to work books I definitely like to ask my leaders what their favorite books are. There are lots of repeats (Crossing the Chasm, Innovator's Dilemma & Solution, Lean Startup, etc), but every now and then someone will have a really unique one that I’ll read. I always read those right away. I’ve also taken book recommendations & then not read the book for like a year. I’ll go back and say, “Hey I finally read that book you recommended forever ago.” It’s fun.

James Murphy (Marketing Manager/Live Nation)

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries because it taught me how and why many businesses fail early on. Also, many of the principles found within the book can be found and applied outside of actual startup companies.

Mitchell Kapor (Founder/Lotus Development Corp.)

The Lean Startup is the book whose lessons I want every entrepreneur to absorb and apply. I know of no better guide to improve the odds of a startup's success.

Dustin Moskovitz (Co-founder/Facebook and Asana)

At Asana, we've been lucky to benefit from Eric's advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business.

Tim Brown (CEO/IDEO)

Eric Ries unravels the mysteries of entrepreneurship and reveals that magic and genius are not the necessary ingredients for success but instead proposes a scientific process that can be learnt and replicated. Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur there are important lessons here for you on your quest toward the new and unknown.

Tim O'Reilly (CEO/O'Reilly Media)

The Lean Startup isn't just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business, it's about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world's great problems. It's ultimately an answer to the question 'How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't?'

Scott Cook (Founder and Chairman/Executive Committee, Intuit)

Business is too important to be left to luck. Eric reveals the rigorous process that trumps luck in the invention of new products and new businesses. We've made this a centerpiece of how teams work in my company . . . it works! This book is the guided tour of the key innovative practices used inside Google, Toyota, and Facebook, that work in any business.

Scott Case (CEO/Startup America Partnership)

Every founding team should stop for 48 hours and read Lean Startup. Seriously stop and read this book now.

Jeffery Immelt (CEO/General Electric)

I make all our managers read The Lean Startup.

Leah Lizarondo (Co-Founder/412 Food Rescue)

One of the most important things that sets people who are successful at being part of startup teams is how comfortable one is with uncertainty. I have heard people say even working at a big corporation is about dealing with uncertainty -- not the same. This is about incremental progress and establishing radical metrics that go beyond vanity. I have always hated long and laborious business plans that try to project too many years out -- the market moves too fast for that. The ability to act and iterate quickly (and being comfortable with that) is as important as setting the "strategy" for a company.

Neal O'Gorman (Serial Entrepreneur)

Of course, not long after reading the summary document, Eric Ries brought out his book The Lean Startup - which is clearly a must read.

Darren Chua (Co-Founder & CEO/Markedshot)

The other books that contributed to my learnings are “How to win friends and influence people”, “The Lean Startup” & “ The 7 habits of highly effective people” I’m sure you have gotten much responses regarding those books and how much they have helped managers/CEOs/entrepreneurs. The lessons from these books were very critical in providing me a direction. They don’t often provide clear answers on how to create a successful business, but what they teach are the principles and techniques to run one.

Iqbal Ameer (Co-Founder/Livescape Group)

Another book I would recommend is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries; it basically explains the ins and outs of starting a business and how to keep it efficient, effective, and open; definitely a great read for future business owners!

Thomas Graziani (Co-founder/WalktheChat)

I truly believe there is a time for each book, and it's important to read the right books at the right time in your life. Older non-business books (Hermann Hesse, Proust, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, etc.) tend in my opinion to contain deeper knowledge which can help one really find direction in life. Second best would be "non-vertical" books which can support in developing either communication skills (Non Violent Communication, Radical Candor) or methodologies (Lean Startup, Lean Customer Development).

Andrew Elliott (Founder/GoDesignerGo)

For tech startups, I would always suggest reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It’s a good start for someone interested in learning a few tactics to minimize startup costs when starting their company.

Seth Louey (Co-Founder & CEO/BotList)

I believe that younger generations should focus on what they are passionate about. We are seeing a trend in tech where working remote, using your personal brand to grow your products, and funding through blockchain technology is the new way of creating startups. So I would read up on The Lean Startup, anything by Gary Vee, Artificial Intelligence, and biography/philosophy of Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs.

Rand Fishkin (Founder/Moz)

Despite all the hype, it truly is a great book on architecting early stage startups.

Omar Taheri (Founder & CEO/Spark Plus)

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries gave me an understanding of how one should launch a start-up with the concept of minimum viable product. The concept is about creating a simple test case to see if you have a viable product before going all in and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars into a product. I used a sample case of people subscribing 10 times to my product before I realized you may have a sustainable business.

David Kramaley (Co-Founder/Chessable)

It has helped shape the way I work and build products, by making me a believer in keeping things as lean as possible for as long as possible, while slowly improving and validating your product. Business can be a risky proposition, and by taking this methodological, almost scientific approach, you mitigate risk and maximise your chances of success.

Erik Cheong (Co-Founder/Park N Parcel)

I will strongly recommend anyone who wants to run his or her own startup to get this book. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup, how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. I applied the Build-Measure-Learn model into my own startup Park N Parcel, the key is to validate all your assumptions and gather market feedback of your services/product via minimum viable product (MVP). To me, this book is like a bible. I keep reading it to constantly remind myself about the lean startup approach.

Grey Baker (Co-Founder/Dependabot)

I read The Lean Startup just after leaving my job at McKinsey & Co., when I was just beginning to think about startups. The advice it gives has become part of the core cannon of startup advice these days, and might feel like old rope to someone starting out now, but it was eye-opening for me. I ended up taking on small product challenges at GoCardless as a result of the iterative approach it espouses, which also fitted the way I’d worked at McKinsey before. I’m not sure I would have ended up running product at GC if I hadn’t read that book.

Theresa Evanoff (Founder/Gift-it-Forward)

As a first-time entrepreneur, I have to say “The Lean Start-Up”, by Eric Ries. It taught me a lot about the need to constantly test one’s vision and to adapt and adjust before it's too late. This was extremely helpful because as a perfectionist, my propensity was to launch the Gift-It-Forward platform only when it was “perfect” (which we know never happens!). The book convinced me to launch with a Beta or Most Viable Product (MVP) that was good enough for launch, allowing me to validate my concept and site early with real users, which was invaluable.

Magda Marcu (Co-Founder/Sailo)

My career path took many turns over the years, and in the end I think that my core prevailed. As an entrepreneur, one must be a dreamer, a risk-taker, an agent of change and not be afraid of barriers. For young people interested in that, I recommend a few great books recommended to me by the Techstars incubator when my company Sailo went through their program:

“Do more faster”
“The Lean Startup”
“Venture Deals”

Nelson Chu (Founder/High5.ai)

I read a lot of different business and startup books, but I think this book is the godfather of books for startups. After this book was published, it changed the way me and many other founders think about the way we build products.

Darvin Kurniawan (CEO & Founder/CrowdVilla)

"The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries is one of the book that fundamentally changed the way I approached creating a new business. Of course by now this might have been considered a cliche, but it is so fundamentally important that many of the newer entrepreneurs fail to think that way.

Meenakshi Sharma (Founder/DateFyx)

As a first-time entrepreneur, the book that really helped was 'The Lean StartUp'. It's a roadmap for anyone starting off as a one-person company with limited resources. I would highly recommend this if your approach has been to fix every small detail before launching your business. It's important to start with a Minimum Viable Product that performs the basic functions, and after proof of concept, can be built into the full-scale product.

Ng Rong Xin (Co-Founder/Explorer Junior)

I think this is the ABC for budding entrepreneurs. It is easy to read, covers many useful techniques and models for entrepreneurs. A classic.

Liam Martin (Co-founder & CMO/Time Doctor & Staff.com)

When I read Eric Ries' Lean Startup I loved the concept of MVP and applied this to features in TimeDoctor, we would simply add a link to a feature in a dashboard without building it to see whether people wanted that feature. We would also take features away to see if anybody got angry about it being gone.

Javed Khatri (Co-founder & Chief Everything Officer/Kustard)

This book teaches you how you can avoid spending time, money and energy on unnecessary things while you are building a company. Overall it helps you build a sustainable business in a lean way.

Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder/Andreessen Horowitz)

The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Lean Startup, and Zero To One are the defining trilogy of intellectual thought on the art and science of modern technology startups. Virtually every page of each is open to debate and yet as a whole they provide intellectual scaffolding for our endeavors that I wish had existed when I started in 1994!

Roxana Bitoleanu (Founder/Taraba Virtuala)

I am currently re-reading The Lean Startup, to refresh certain aspects of this kind of mindset for current and future projects.

Alexandra Stroe (Co-CEO/Bookster)

My favourite business book is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I think this book is the one that helped us find a viable business model for Bookster by testing different hypotheses and pivoting when needed. We still use the knowledge from this book in everyday projects. You would hear colleagues asking in the office: how does an MVP (minimum viable product) look like? Did you apply the Build-Measure-Learn theory? What is your value proposition? I recommend this book to anyone starting a business or even starting any kind of project.

Iulia Ghita (CEO/Bookster)

Chandini Jain (CEO/Auquan)

Chris Goward (Founder/WiderFunnel & GO Group Digital)

Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: [...] The Lean Startup.

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Amazon description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

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The Lean Startup

This book has 45 recommendations

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