Startup success can be engineered by following the right process. That means the process can be learned, and if it can be learned, it can be taught.
Ries builds the argument around a contrast between myth and method:
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The myth: startup success is determined by talent, hard work, and having the right product.
- The belief is false. It is a product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization, sustained by a “mythmaking industry.”
- It is also attractive. It explains failure through external factors - we lacked the right qualities - and lets people ignore the “boring” details of how the work is done.
- Most startups, products, and ideas do not survive. Promising beginnings
regularly end in failure, so “the right product plus hard work” is not
sufficient for success.
- [ET] One possible reason is precisely the widespread belief in this myth and the resulting concentration on the product.
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The method: “the boring stuff is the most important.” Success does not come from the right genes or a lucky place and time; it comes from following the right process.
- If success can be engineered through a process, the process can be learned. If it can be learned, it can also be taught.
- One consequence is that entrepreneurship is a kind of management, despite the apparently opposite associations of the two words. See A startup rejects predictable-domain management, not management itself.
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[ET] Not knowing the process for turning product ideas into a successful business practically guarantees failure.
- Ries makes that claim only about his first startup: “we were doomed from day one, because we did not know the process.” Extending it to every startup is an extrapolation from a single case.