Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and Michael and I are here together interviewing Eric Reese, who wrote the book on The Lean Startup. And it's been actually now over five, is that right? Eric, about over five years since that book came out. Yeah, it came out in 2011. So next fall will be the five year anniversary of its publication. And of course, the publication know, the end of a process of blogging and writing and kind of building that community.

I was about to say, because I feel like your book came out well after Lean Startup was already

on its way. Yeah. Well, the other interesting thing that I think we'd like to talk to you about

is how things have changed since then and now. But more importantly,

we'd love to also, because one of the things that's happened is that lean startup is now

outside of Silicon Valley. And it's gone also outside of startups, interestingly. So we want to hear

a little bit about your insights from that. And then kind of talk about not just a lean startup,

but what it means for the future of the firm. What is a lean startup? And if it's not a

startup, how does that apply? Yeah. So the basic idea is to take a more scientific, more

iterative, and more customer-centric approach to product development and customer building.

It's called lean startup because we take ideas from lean manufacturing around cycle time and batch size and iteration, but we apply them not to the factory floor, but to the process of innovation itself, where the signal that pulls work from us is not the order from a customer, since in most startups, we don't have a customer yet.

We don't know who the customer is going to be.

The pull signal is our hypotheses, our beliefs about what the customer will want in the future. Or another way of

saying it is we write these business plans that are full of assumptions and hypotheses and guesses

about the future. And Lean Startup says, rather than take those things for granted and in hope that

they're true, let's test them scientifically, accepting the fact that every startup face is high uncertainty

about the future.

So how do you respond to critics who say, like I would say actually, thinking about it more

ethnographically, that you're essentially only then building for people who know what they,

like, it's based on what the market is saying is feedback

versus like true internal creativity that's an internal compass.

Yeah.

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