Book review for: The Lean startup by Eric Ries (Book Review Sample)

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Book review for: The Lean startup by Eric Ries
Biography of the author
Eric Ries was born in 1978 and is a young American entrepreneur, author and blogger. After clearing high school, Eric enrolled in Yale University and he graduated in 2001 with a B.S. in computer science. Eric published his first book titled, "Black Art of Java Game Programming" while in high school. He began practicing his entrepreneurial skills while at Yale University when he was a co-founder of catalyst recruiting, which was an online platform that helped students network with potential employers. At the same time, Ries sat at the advisory board of a venture fund in new haven Connecticut and the advisory board of two startup incubators.
He was one of the co-founders of IMVU Inc. where he served as the Chief Technology Officer. Today, he is a regular speaker at major business events and has advised several large companies, startups and venture capital companies on product and business strategies. He is also an entrepreneurs-in-residence at the Harvard Business School (Ries, 295). His famous Lean Startup methodology has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, wall street journal and the New York Times. His current residence is San Francisco.
Book summary
A high number of startup businesses fail and do not live to see their first or second birth birthdays. However, it is so sad that all the efforts that entrepreneurs put in startups go to waste when such failures can be prevented. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries presents entrepreneurs with a new approach aimed at changing the ways in which businesses and companies are established and how new products are launched into the market. In the book, Ries defines a startup as a business entity that is dedicated to developing something totally new under conditions of extreme uncertainties (Ries, 11). The Lean Startup approach is meant to foster companies that leverage human creativity more effectively as well as those that are more capital efficient.
Inspired by the experience and lessons from lean manufacturing, the book relies on rapid scientific experimentation, validated learning and several counter-intuitive practices that gauge actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, shorten product lifecycles, and learn what customers precisely want. The book contains plans to help companies change direction slowly with agility, change plans bit by bit, inch by inch. Instead of wasting precious time coming up with elaborate business plans, the Eric Ries presents entrepreneurs – in all companies regardless of size- with a means of analyzing and testing their visions constantly, to adapt and make necessary changes before it becomes too late (Ries, 14). Moreover, the author provides a scientific methodology of creating and managing successful startups at a time when business enterprises need to be innovative more than ever.
Critical review
The main argument of the author is that start-ups tend to be risky that they need to be. Entrepreneurs in all businesses fields make the same mistakes of building elaborate products and services before having the courage to test them with the consumers. Consequently, many of them make decisions based on the wrong information and stick with bad ideas for long. This poor decision making can be attributed to the long held entrepreneurial myths of people who persisted through ceaseless rejections and were later validated by successes. According to Ries, these exceptional cases of people who persisted through rejection and eventually achieved success lead many to avoidable failures (Ries, 18). One thing that makes this book unique from all others in its category is that it borrows from the experiences of the author and also includes fresh entrepreneurial stories mainly drawn from the tech industry.
The author proposes five key principles for startups that every entrepreneur should observe. These principles are; entrepreneurship is everywhere, entrepreneurship is management, need for validated learning, build-measure-plan and lastly innovation plan. With the above mentioned principles in mind, the author takes the reader through the book in three main parts namely; "vision”, "steer" and "accelerate" (Ries, 20). Unlike many other authors, Ries builds his case gradually and incorporates numerous case studies that include his experiences at IMVU. For example, the author states that Intuit showed with Snaptax that they could develop a good product even if they are big organization. The company moved on to break the innovator’s dilemma. Other stories that the author uses in the book are Facebook, Zappos and Path.
In the first part of the book titled "Vision”, the author excellently builds the case for entrepreneurial management discipline. In doing this, Ries defines who an entrepreneur is, the meaning of startup and means of gauging whether startups are making good prog...