“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”

Why it was said

Eric Ries writes this in The Lean Startup while arguing that a head start is rarely large enough to matter, and that time spent in stealth mode, away from customers, is unlikely to provide one. Speed of learning from customers is the advantage he puts in its place.

What it actually means

A startup, in Ries's definition, is an organisation operating under extreme uncertainty, and under uncertainty the scarce thing is not effort but knowledge. The team that discovers fastest what people will pay for, through the build-measure-learn loop run on small tests, will out-build a team with twice the engineers and no idea. The sentence sets speed of learning, not speed of building, as the competitive advantage.

How to use it

1. 1Decide what you need to learn before deciding what to build; then build the smallest thing that teaches it.
2. 2Measure what customers do, not what they say, and put a date on the decision to persevere or pivot.