Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right.
Eric RiesProducts a start-up builds are really experimentsโฆLearning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.โ โ[A startup is] โฆ an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric RiesMost phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Eric RiesWhat differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
Eric RiesHere in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.
Eric Ries