Build. Measure. Learn, w/Eric Ries of The Lean Startup and the LTSE
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Forget writing that business plan. Design an experiment instead. So many products and companies fail because the assumptions in their beautiful business plans were just wrong. So stop writing and start testing. No one knows this better than Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange. After his first product failed, he developed a new method of product design based on running small, fast experiments, measuring the results, and learning from them. It’s a system built on data, not assumptions, and it works with almost everything, from app development to airplane design. It starts with establishing your own measure of success — then experimenting, improving, and trying over and over again. The feedback loop never stops.
Learn more about the Long Term Stock Exchange: ltse.com
Learn more about The Lean Startup: leanstartup.co
Read Eric’s blog, Startup Lessons Learned: startuplessonslearned.com
Listen to Eric’s new podcast, Out of the Crisis, on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/out-of-the-crisis/id1505392824
Read a transcript of this episode at https://mastersofscale.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now, |
| 0:07.8 | with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed. |
| 0:17.0 | We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time. |
| 0:24.8 | So search for rapid response in your podcast player |
| 0:28.0 | and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | I'll see you on the other side. |
| 0:36.0 | They set this tent up next to a plastics factory and it apparently smelled horrible. |
| 0:43.4 | And when they answered the phone, |
| 0:44.3 | they weren't allowed to say what they were up to |
| 0:45.6 | because it was a top secret project. |
| 0:47.6 | So one of the engineers on the project, Erv Culver, |
| 0:51.5 | took to picking up the phone and saying, Erv here, skunk works. |
| 0:54.0 | Our storyteller here is Nick Means, director of engineering at GitHub and a passionate student of aviation history. |
| 1:05.0 | So it's natural that he be fascinated by the infamous skunk works, |
| 1:10.0 | a top secret project at Lockheed Martin. |
| 1:15.0 | The story has a mythic status among engineers and entrepreneurs. |
| 1:21.0 | So Skunkworks came out of Lockheed Martin in the midst of World War II. The Germans had created the Messerschmidt Emmy 262, the first jet fighter deployed in combat. |
| 1:40.0 | The US was looking for an answer to it. |
| 1:44.0 | And we were way behind on jet engine technology. |
| 1:48.0 | The Germans, having the world's first operational jet-powered fighter plane was an urgent escalation in the war. |
| 1:56.0 | The Allies couldn't afford to lose this particular arms race. |
| 2:00.6 | The British government offered us the de HavilandH-1B goblin engine design. |
... |
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