Eric Ries
| Eric Ries | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 22, 1978 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Yale University |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, blogger, author |
Eric Ries (born September 9, 1978) is an American entrepreneur, blogger and author of The Lean Startup, a book on the lean startup movement.
While at Yale, he began his entrepreneurial career as the co-founder of Catalyst Recruiting, an online forum for university students to network with potential employers. During this time, Ries was also on the advisory board for two startup incubators and a venture fund in New Haven, Connecticut. He took a leave of absence from his undergraduate studies to pursue Catalyst Recruiting. Due to Ries' lack of business experience and the burst of the dot-com bubble, the company soon folded.
After graduating, Ries moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 to work 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 failed and in 2004, Ries left to start another company, IMVU Inc.
In 2004, Ries joined one of the founders of There.com, Will Harvey, to co-found IMVU, a social network. Ries met IMVU investor Steve Blank, who insisted that IMVU executives audit his class on entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. There he picked up Blank's method of fast customer feedback, which Blank called "Customer Development", and applied it at IMVU, 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.
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.
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