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The Startup Way
Eric Ries
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What is The Startup Way about?
Eric Ries takes the lean startup methodology beyond garage founders and shows how big companies, agencies, and nonprofits can rebuild themselves around continuous innovation. Drawing on case studies from GE, Toyota, Intuit, and the U.S. government, he lays out a practical playbook for entrepreneurial management at scale.
Key ideas of The Startup Way
Entrepreneurship as a Job Function
Most companies have no formal role for figuring out what to build next under uncertainty, and that structural gap is why good ideas die inside large organizations.
Metered Funding Over Annual Budgets
Replacing locked annual budgets with tranches tied to validated learning stops bad projects from consuming years of resources before anyone admits the assumptions were wrong.
Innovation Accounting
Tracking per-customer conversion, retention, and growth metrics against specific leap-of-faith assumptions gives finance teams a way to evaluate progress before revenue exists.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The Startup Way — summary
The phone call that exposed a $200 million blind spot
In 2012, Eric Ries got a phone call from General Electric. They were not asking for advice on a tiny pilot project. They were asking him to help them build engines. The kind of engines that power oil platforms and locomotives. The kind that take five years and several hundred million dollars to bring to market.
Ries flew to GE's leadership academy in Crotonville and walked into a conference room full of senior executives. On the wall hung the plan for a new turbine engine called the Series X. Five-year roadmap. Multiple market segments. Eight-figure budget. Every milestone color-coded in green. The team had done what good engineers do when given a hard problem: they had over-engineered an answer to it. Then Ries asked one simple question. He pointed at the bar chart and said, "Raise your hand if you believe this forecast." Every executive raised a hand. He pointed at one specific year on the chart and asked them to raise their hand if they believed that specific number. Nobody moved.
That single moment is the heart of the book. We have built a global economy on plans that nobody actually believes, and we keep funding them anyway. Eric Ries wrote The Startup Way to fix that. His 2011 book The Lean Startup taught founders how to test ideas with real customers before betting the farm. This sequel is about something far harder. It is about taking the same scientific habits and bolting them onto enormous, slow, profitable companies that already exist. Companies like GE. Like Toyota. Like the United States federal government. Companies that everybody assumes are too big to think like a startup, and that Ries believes will not survive the next decade if they do not learn how.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who leads a team inside a large company and feels blocked by the annual budget cycle and five-year roadmaps.
- Anyone who wants to understand why big organizations keep shipping products no one asked for and how to stop.
- Anyone who is responsible for building a culture of experimentation without dismantling the existing business.
- Anyone who thinks lean startup principles only apply to early-stage founders and wants to see them work at government scale.
About the author: Eric Ries
Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur and author best known for The Lean Startup, published in 2011, which popularized the build-measure-learn loop and the minimum viable product concept for early-stage companies.
He has worked directly with companies including General Electric, Intuit, and the United States federal government to apply entrepreneurial management practices at scale. He also founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, a public exchange designed to reward companies and investors focused on long-term value creation.
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