2009_06_08 The Lean Startup Tokyo edition

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hi, I’m Eric Ries. I wan to talk to you today about one simple fact: that the vast majority of high-tech startups fail. It does not have to be that way.Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly. They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. The premise of the lean startup is simple: if we can reduce the time between these major iterations, we can increase the odds of success.
• #4: Hi, I’m Eric Ries. I wan to talk to you today about one simple fact: that the vast majority of high-tech startups fail. It does not have to be that way.Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly. They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. The premise of the lean startup is simple: if we can reduce the time between these major iterations, we can increase the odds of success.
• #5: Hi, I’m Eric Ries. I wan to talk to you today about one simple fact: that the vast majority of high-tech startups fail. It does not have to be that way.Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly. They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. The premise of the lean startup is simple: if we can reduce the time between these major iterations, we can increase the odds of success.
• #6: Hi, I’m Eric Ries. I want to talk to you today about one simple fact: that the vast majority of high-tech startups fail. It does not have to be that way.Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly. They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. The premise of the lean startup is simple: if we can reduce the time between these major iterations, we can increase the odds of success.
• #10: Start a company with a compelling long-term vision. Don't get distracted by trying to flip it. Instead, try and build a company that will matter on the scale of the next century. Aim to become the \"next AOL or Microsoft\" not a niche player.Raise sufficient capital to have an extended runway from experienced smart money investors with deep pockets who are prepared to make follow-on investments.Hire the absolute best and the brightest, true experts in their fields, who in turn can hire the smartest people possible to staff their departments. Insist on the incredibly high-IQ employees and hold them to incredibly high standards.Bring in an expert CEO with outstanding business credentials and startup experience to focus on relentless execution.Build a truly mainstream product. Focus on quality. Ship it when it's done, not a moment before. Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. Conduct constant focus groups and usability tests.Build a world-class technology platform, with patent-pending algorithms and the ability to scale to millions of simultaneous users.Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch.
• #12: By hiring experts, conducting lots of focus groups, and executing to a detailed plan, the company became deluded that it knew what customers wanted. I remember vividly a scene at a board meeting, where the company was celebrating a major milestone. The whole company and board play-tested the product to see its new features first hand. Everyone had fun; the product worked. But that was two full years before any customers were allowed to use it. Nobody even asked the question: why not ship this now? It was considered naive that the \"next AOL\" would ship a product that wasn't ready for prime time. Stealth is a customer-free zone. All of the efforts to create buzz, keep competitors in the dark, and launch with a bang had the direct effect of starving the company for much-needed feedback.
• #13: Even though some aspects of the product were eventually vindicated as good ones, the underlying architecture suffered from hard-to-change assumptions. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. Even a great architecture becomes inflexible. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development.
• #14: This is the most devastating thing about achieving a failure: while in the midst of it, you think you're making progress. This company had disciplined schedules, milestones, employee evaluations, and a culture of execution. When schedules were missed, people were held accountable. Unfortunately, there was no corresponding discipline of evaluating the quality of the plan itself. As the company built infrastructure and added features, the team celebrated these accomplishments. Departments were built and were even metrics-driven. But there was no feedback loop to help the company find the right metrics to focus on.
• #15: Do our actions live up to our ideals?
• #17: After our crushing failure, the founders of my next company decided to question every single assumption for how a startup should be built. Failure gave us the courage to try some radical things.
• #18: After our crushing failure, the founders of my next company decided to question every single assumption for how a startup should be built. Failure gave us the courage to try some radical things.
• #20: Based on that experience, and the experience of the other startups I have worked for, I now strongly believe there is a better way to create startups. I’ve called this vision the Lean Startup. It combines three key trends.
• #24: Let’s look at those changes schematically.
• #29: Webcast: May 1Workshop: May 29Fliers up frontDiscussion in web2open
• #30: Take a moment to close your eyes…
• #35: Run tests locally:-- Sandbox includes as much of production as humanly possible (db, memcached, Solr, Apache).-- Write tests in every language. We use 8 different test frameworks for different environs. Otherwise you get fear and brittle.-- Example kind of problem is that AJAX updater for site header. Seemingly innocuous change would break shopping experience.CIT/BuildBot:-- Simply don’t push with red tests. Even if the site is in trouble. Example Christmas site outage with memcache sampling.-- Give an idea of the scale. 20 machine cluster, runs 10000 tests and 100,000’s of thousand of assertions on every change.Incremental deploy:-- Catch performance bugs and gaps in test coverageSlow query in free tags. This started to drive database load higher on one MySQL instance due to contention and data size. Detected and rolled back before it affected users and before the database was hosed due to high load.Changed transaction commit logic in foundation of the system. This passed all tests but caused registrations to fail in production due to subtle difference between sandbox and production. System detected drop in business metric in 1 minute and reverted the changeAlerting and Predictive MonitoringExample: Second tier ISP to block our outbound emailExample: Rooms list performance time bombExample: Registration quality, second tier payment methods, invite mail success rates by serviceStory: Anything that can go wrong will, so just catch it then fast.
• #41: When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem.Here's how it works. Let's say you notice that your website is down. Obviously, your first priority is to get it back up. But as soon as the crisis is past, you have the discipline to have a post-mortem in which you start asking why: 1. why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100% 2. why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop! 3. why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake 4. why did his mistake get checked in? He didn't write a unit test for the feature 5. why didn't he write a unit test? He's a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDDSo far, this isn't much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. The next step is this: you have to commit to make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis. So, in the example above, we'd have to take five corrective actions: 1. bring the site back up 2. remove the bad code 3. help so-and-so understand why his code doesn't work as written 4. train so-and-so in the principles of TDD 5. change the new engineer orientation to include TDD