Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman

Episode 64 | June 16, 2020

Podcast Link

https://mastersofscale.com/eric-ries/

Podcast Introduction ****

Masters of Scale is a business and finance podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. The show is created and owned by WaitWhat. In each episode, Hoffman introduces a theory on how successful businesses scale and tests their validity by interviewing founders about their path to scale.

Guests Introduction

Eric Ries is the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way. He’s the host of the new podcast Out of the Crisis. Nick Means is the director of engineering at GitHub. Pierre Bohanna is a prop maker for feature films like Titanic, The Dark Knight, and the Harry Potter series.

Skunk Works, Galileo, and MVP

• Skunk Works was a top-secret project at Lockheed Martin
• US Airforce formed it during World War II for developing jet engine technology
• No large blueprinting exercise was undertaken in Skunk Works
• Engineers and fabricators worked together in the same facility for quick feedback and improvements
• This cohesion led the prototype been developed within five months
• Nick and Eric consider this as the forerunner for the Minimum Viability Process (MVP) as later adopted by the Silicon Valley
• It involved spending less time on blueprints, more time on building quickly, collecting data, and iterating
• Reid feels just like Skunk Works, any new business should follow the same process