Repost - Original by Nicole Gravagna posted on nicolegravagna.com on Aug 5, 2013

Last week I read "The Lean Startup" for the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a public confession.

What I discovered is that very little in this book is news to me. But how could that be? I'd never read it. I've never seen Eric Ries speak. How could I possibly know this stuff? Moreover, I've been TEACHING this stuff.

The methods and teachings in the Lean Startup have become so ingrained in the startup community that they are now commonplace best practices. Entrepreneurs in their 20s don't know a world without this methodology. And this is amazing to me because the book was published in 2010. Only three years ago.

The book traveled like wildfire through the hands of entrepreneurs. Why?

• It's an easy read. It's akin to a bedtime story for people who spend their days thinking in code, design, and venture creation.
• It contains an interesting mix of making total sense and completely bucking (what used to be) the system. It's the good cop, bad cop of methodologies.
• Reis is a prolific public speaker. He's a thought leader and spends a lot of time in front of audiences.

Also, it's important to note that Ries' revolutionizing book wasn't the first source for this information. The Lean Startup methodology was a distillation of Steve Blank's dense work called "The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win."

Reis was Blank's student at Stanford. And I just want to pause to point out that this is another example of a student - mentor combination that took the world by storm.

Steve Blank's Four Steps was published in 2005, five years before Ries' digest version. Nearly a decade has gone by since this methodology was published and a decade is a little more understandable in terms of a wide-spread revolution timeline. Moreover, Steve wrote his book based on his curriculum at Stanford which means there were classes of folks who were learning and using this information prior to 2005.

But still, it's pretty amazing how fast the community adopted and implemented the new concepts.

I'll argue that The Lean Startup/Four Steps revolution is only the beginning. In the startup community, we are all in the business of making new businesses. This field of new venture creation is ripe for new methods to build and grow companies. I say this, not because we are a stodgy old bunch of folks, but because we are in a brand new field and the community is made of an eclectic mix of people. Whenever you have diversity in a population, you get new ideas.

The entrepreneurship community is unusual in that entrepreneurs often begin their careers as engineers, coders, scientists, marketing professionals, or some other profession. Until recently there was no track for entrepreneurship in school. At some point each of us discovered the world of entrepreneurship, stepped in, and brought with us the unique background and perspectives from our former lives. It's the varied mindsets and worldviews that makes this a highly enriched community. With this intellectual diversity, we have motley influences and concepts from which to draw.

The startup community, as we know it, is nacent. The Lean Startup/ Four Steps revolution just happened. The whole innovative, new company formation concept was born along with the invention of Venture Capital. The first venture capital firms were formed in the 1940s. Not so long ago.

We will see many more changes, revolutions, and modernizations to the way we create companies. The success rate of new ventures is currently very low. This is partly due to the high risk nature of innovation, but probably has a lot to do with the way we go about creating companies in the first place. There is room to mature, improve, and adjust our methodologies to increase the rate of success for new companies. We also have room to improve the types of companies that we develop. I think we'd all like to see more meaningful entities succeed and solve deeper pains than we are solving today with our ever growing cadre of iPhone and Android apps.

The startup community will see a few more revolutions in our lifetime. Predictions?