He bro-hugs Justin Rosenstein, who holds the dubious distinction (by his own admission) of having invented the “like” button on Facebook (FB) and now runs Asana, a collaboration software startup. He huddles with a grateful team from the National Security Agency, which has implemented his techniques-on a project involving nuclear codes, no less.
The 39-year-old guru himself is here too, holding court in a dimly lit greenroom in the bowels of the theater. “He unequivocally has been as impactful on the mindset of startups as anyone else in the last decade,” says Rob Siegel, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s business school.
Entrepreneurs everywhere have adopted his vocabulary as well as his methods, including testing their hypotheses with customers and gauging the success of innovation with relevant accounting measurements beyond revenues and market share. The mark Ries has made on the startup landscape cannot be overstated. Ries went from blogging about startups to becoming one of Silicon Valley’s most sought-after consultants- a career he says he never anticipated. The mantras they repeat-most prominently “minimum viable product,” or MVP, a company’s quickest, cheapest way to test the market, and “pivot,” which is what businesses do when failure demands a new approach-all come from Ries’s 2011 book, which has sold more than a million copies in English and has been published in 30 languages. The occasion for these sermons is the annual Lean Startup Conference, in November, and the speakers share a common trait: They are disciples of Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, the seminal tract that spawned a self-proclaimed movement of which this is a convocation of the faithful. Agency for International Development, warns nonprofits not to measure success with “vanity metrics” and decries the perils of “ramping too quickly.” Ann Mei Chang, a former chief innovation officer at the U.S. Jyoti Shukla, vice president of user experience at retailer Nordstrom (JWN), enthuses about having a “customer-first mindset” and “an ability to ride with change and embrace discomfort.” Alex Osterwalder of the consultancy Strategyzer, which coaches clients through “innovation sprints,” urges attendees to have a “21st-century org chart.” Even outposts of the federal government have mastered the lingo.
The speakers are an eclectic group, yet they’re singing from the same buzzword-laden hymnal.
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