The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time.

With an internal startup team, the sequence of accountability is the same: build an ideal model of the desired disruption that is based on customer archetypes, launch a minimum viable product to establish a baseline, and then attempt to tune the engine to get it closer to the ideal.

Working in the innovation sandbox is like developing startup muscles. At first, the team will be able to take on only modest experiments. The earliest experiments may fail to produce much learning and may not lead to scalable success.

The two most important assumptions entrepreneurs make are what I call the value hypothesis and the growth hypothesis.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Instead, we need to focus our energies on minimizing the total time through this feedback loop.