Eric Ries

Eric Ries studied computer science at Yale and went to Silicon Valley in the first dot-com boom, where his first company, an online recruiting startup, failed in the way the era's companies did: a long build toward a product nobody had asked for. In 2004 he co-founded IMVU, a virtual-world and avatar company, and it was there, watching a beautifully engineered product meet indifference and then learning to ship changes many times a day, that the method took shape.

He began writing about it on a blog called Startup Lessons Learned, drawing on Steve Blank's customer development and on lean manufacturing from Toyota, and named the approach the Lean Startup. The book of that name, published in 2011, turned the blog into a system: validated learning, the Build-Measure-Learn loop, the minimum viable product, innovation accounting and the pivot. Its vocabulary became the working language of startups within a few years.

Ries followed it with The Startup Way in 2017, applying the method inside large organisations, and later founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, a US exchange designed for companies that want to be measured over decades rather than quarters.