Harvard i-lab | Eric Ries - Startup Lessons Learned

So how many people have seen the social network? Quick show of hands.

OK, pretty much everyone.

I lived through the first half of the social network.

Unfortunately, the part where you work really, really hard, not the later parts.

And Clark, who worked with me at that company, was one of my partners in building this company that was going to create online profiles for college students for the purpose of sharing.

Sounds pretty good, right? But we wanted them to share them with employers for the purpose of getting a job.

So we were so close, Clark.

I'm sorry.

Almost.

We could have been there.

We could have, would have, should have.

What's so funny about that is that if you'd gone back in time and you told me, listen, you're almost there, but what you need to do is make this so that college students can poke each other with their profiles.

I would have been like, that is the stupidest thing anyone's ever said to me.

Listen, we're trying to build a real business here.

When you charge customers money, we're going to build no Facebook.

So that shows you how brilliant I am as a product visionary.

But we really believe that that was what it meant to build a real business.

To manage a business meant it would look like this very rigid, specific thing about charging customers money.

We didn't really understand why you did that.

Because our understanding about entrepreneurship was like this.

In all the movies, in Social Network, in every magazine profile you've ever read about a great entrepreneur, the story is always told in three acts.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Act one.

the plucky protagonist, their character strengths and defects that will turn out to be really interesting later, how they came to be in the exact right place at the exact right time, how they came up with their brilliant idea, how they recruited the super smart people to work with them, et cetera.

Act two is really short.