Eric Ries

Eric Ries (born September 22, 1978) is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author of The Lean Startup, a book on the lean startup movement. He is also the author of The Startup Way, a book on modern entrepreneurial management.

In high school he published a book, Black Art of Java Game Programming.

While an undergraduate at Yale University, Ries co-founded Catalyst Recruiting, an online forum for university students to network with potential employers. The company received funding but ran out of money in the dot-com bust.

After graduating with a BS in computer science, Ries moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 as a software engineer with There, Inc. He worked with the firm until the 2003 launch of its web-based 3D Virtual World product, There.com. The company soon failed.

In 2004, Ries left to join one of the founders of There.com, Will Harvey in co-founding IMVU Inc., a social network. IMVU investor Steve Blank insisted that IMVU executives audit Blank's class on entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. There Ries picked up Blank's method of fast customer feedback, which Blank called "customer development", and applied it at IMVU in combination with lean software development, testing alternate versions of the product and measuring download rates. IMVU deployed code to production nearly 50 times a day, an unusually rapid development cycle. Ries also copyedited an early version of Blank's book on customer development, The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

IMVU aimed to integrate instant messaging with the high revenue per customer of traditional video games. Ries and Harvey did not seek a large amount of initial funding and released a minimum viable product within six months. In 2006, the firm raised $1 million in its first round of venture fundraising from the Seraph Group, eventually raising an additional 18 million. In 2008 after a new CEO joined IMVU, Ries stepped down as CTO, remaining as a board observer.

After leaving IMVU, Ries joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a venture advisor, and six months later started advising startups independently. Based on his experiences, he developed a methodology based on select management principles to help startups succeed. The lean startup methodology originates from a combination of ideas such as lean manufacturing, which seeks to increase value-creating practices and eliminate wasteful practices, and Steve Blank's customer development methodology.

In 2008, Ries began to document the lean startup methodology on his blog with a post titled "The lean startup".

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great. Authors Equity, 2026

The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth. Currency, 2017.

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Currency, 2011.