Part One: Vision – Chapter 1: Start
One of the greatest paradoxes in the business world is that when we hear the word “startup,” we instinctively think of chaos, ping-pong tables in the office, and sleep-deprived programmers coding until dawn. Conversely, the word “management” conjures images of formal suits, tedious board meetings, and rigid organizational charts. In the first chapter of his book, Eric Ries shatters these mental boundaries and reveals a profound truth: Entrepreneurship is management.
However, managing a startup is fundamentally different from managing a corporate giant like General Motors. A startup requires a new managerial framework capable of navigating “extreme uncertainty.”
“A startup is not just a product; it is a human institution, and every institution requires management. But it must be a management specifically engineered for highly volatile and unpredictable conditions.”
Driving a Car vs. Launching a Rocket
To better understand this new management model, Ries utilizes a brilliant metaphor. He argues that launching a traditional business is akin to “launching a rocket.” You must calculate everything months in advance with millimeter precision: the launch angle, the fuel load, and the exact trajectory. If the slightest error occurs in those initial calculations, the rocket explodes in space. In this model, there is no opportunity to change course mid-flight.
Launching a startup, on the other hand, is like “driving a car.” You know your ultimate destination (your vision), but to get there, you turn the steering wheel left and right thousands of times, hit the brakes in traffic, and choose alternate routes. You navigate the vehicle based on “continuous, real-time feedback” from the road.
The Roots of Lean; From Toyota’s Assembly Line to Silicon Valley
Where does the term “Lean” come from? To find the answer, Ries takes us back to the Toyota manufacturing plants in Japan, where Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo pioneered the Toyota Production System (TPS). While American companies took pride in mass production and stockpiling thousands of vehicles in warehouses, Toyota introduced a revolutionary philosophy: shrinking batch sizes and embracing Just-in-Time manufacturing.
Lean thinking at Toyota was governed by one simple rule: any activity that does not create value for the end customer is considered “waste” and must be eliminated. Eric Ries adapted this very concept to the world of software and technology. He realized that in startups, the ultimate waste is spending time and money building a product that nobody wants!
📌 A Practical Tip:
To avoid falling into the trap of “wasting energy and capital,” you must release your initial product to the market quickly to gather real user feedback. Sometimes, an SEO-optimized landing page, a lightweight mobile application (MVP), or even a strategically managed professional social media presence can serve as the ultimate test for your idea. If you are launching a startup and need standard web infrastructure, app development, or SEO enhancement to test market feedback with minimal risk, the engineering team at Stinoment (led by Hamed Asghari) is by your side. For a free consultation, you can visit our client support and contact page.
The goal of a startup is not to blindly execute ideas written on paper; rather, the goal is to transform into a “learning organization” that tests its hypotheses in the real market with minimal cost and maximum speed.
💡 Note from Hamed Asghari (CEO of Stinoment)
Adapting Toyota’s factory system to the fast-paced world of tech startups is one of the most brilliant managerial breakthroughs of the 21st century. When we analyze global Unicorn startups—privately held startup companies valued at over $1 billion—there is one clear commonality: they prioritize high adaptability over rigid, unchangeable master plans.
As a business leader, I constantly remind our development and marketing teams at Stinoment that we are not simply in the business of writing flawless code; we are in the business of discovering and solving real customer needs. If we spend months behind closed doors coding to create what we assume is a “100% perfect” product, we are acting exactly like the engineer who launched a rocket into space with no steering mechanism.
“Lean management” does not mean working cheaply or delivering low quality; it means accelerating the feedback loop. In today’s highly competitive global markets, the company that learns faster than its rivals wins. In my view, the true art of a modern startup executive is keeping their hands firmly on the steering wheel, never fearing to change direction when confronted with real market data.