Eric Ries

Coined the term MVP and popularized lean methodology across tens of thousands of startups worldwide; also founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, showing he practices long-term thinking alongside rapid experimentation Their core argument: Ship the MVP quickly — but MVP is about efficient hypothesis testing, not shipping garbage. The evidence is specific: Company that built a beautiful product but had a JavaScript error on the signup button — 0% signups, and they could not tell if the value prop was wrong or the button was broken. Furthermore, iMVU's 3D avatars were terrible compared to competitors but the small, crappy version outperformed because it tested the right hypothesis. Working with companies in deep-sea oil drilling and jet engines where the MVP bar seems impossibly high but the logic still applies. In Eric Ries's own words: "People think that MVP is about a specific tactic. So, an MVP is like a bare bones, stripped down the thing that will crash your computer, but it's not anything to do with MVP. MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether a hypothesis is true or not?" (Responding to Linear founder Karri Saarinen's question about whether MVPs still work given rising user expectations.)