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bilater | on: I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out.

My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. Or follow it to a tee and fail which is what all of them did (happy to hear about any counter examples here from the original book). So what exactly is the point if you can't even move the needle a little bit?

eries | parent
Academics have spent the last 15 years attempting to measure these effects, and it's just a very hard measurement problem. There are so many confounding variables. I would say the early evidence is supportive of the thesis, broadly speaking. In the long run, I expect we will eventually be able to speak about this in a much more nuanced way. For example, some of the elements of LS are much easier to test than others, and those have been found to be broadly effective.

This project may take decades, and yet leaders need guidance and useful mental models in the meantime. So, to me, the much more useful data is the literally thousands of founders (and other leaders) who have reported that they have found the framework useful in their own lives and companies. They may all be deluded, of course, but at some point I think we have to acknowledge that _something_ useful is going on here.

In any event, I don't give it that much thought. If a new theory emerges that proves more useful, or if new research gives entrepreneurs new and better tools, I'd be delighted. My only loyalty is to the truth.