On August 3 106 Miles, Hackers & Founders, and Microsoft hosted a conversation between Eric Ries and Lara Druyan about Lean Startups ...

Watch the video of their conversation here.

Here are my 49 favorite Eric Ries lines from the evening, lovingly curated from my tweets on August 3 before they disappear into Twitter's void forever, in reverse order of Eric saying them, numbered for no reason other than if we want to call out a number in the conversation below... Enjoy!

1. "Hire people who know your product better than you do on that first day of work. Such as, amazing open source folks who know the open source parts of your stack better than you do."
2. "Your real job in a startup is to do whatever it takes to make that startup successful. What should be our best practices?"
3. "Agility Brains Communication Drive Empathy Fit."
4. "Which features do customers think they care about? Are you collecting data about that?"
5. "Our early adopters got the worst deal ever: they paid $30 for a book that now retails on Amazon at $15."
6. "The book comes out September 13. Using Lean Startup principles, we sold our first pre-order last September, a year early."
7. "Conventional wisdom is that visionary entrepreneurs can will their vision into reality. That's not science."
8. "JFDI is startup alchemy, not startup science. Unexpected results are -- woo hoo! -- an opportunity to learn something that's really true."
9. "If your plan is to ship something and see what happens, you are guaranteed to succeed at shipping something and seeing what happens."
10. "Slogans sound good but the truth is complicated."
11. "Accurate bad news is way better than good news you made up."
12. "Learning milestone number one is establishing the baseline to prove the business in microscale."
13. "Planning is not the problem. The Plan is the problem. Work toward learning milestones. Make assumptions visible."
14. "Tip for fundraising: Plausible promise. Put the largest number you actually can make."
15. "Entrepreneurship is local but more hubs are emerging globally."
16. "Replace seemingly meritocratic processes with ACTUALLY meritocratic processes."
17. "Ask for resumes with name, gender, race, and age of candidate blocked out. It changes who you will interview."
18. "If an incubator has mostly white men 25 to 35, that's a canary in the coal mine. Why are we cool with that?"
19. "If the system sucks we should replace it with a better system."
20. "When you ship a feature and it gets no comments, you've failed. When people hate it, it means they care."
21. "If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is."
22. "If you're making something customers don't want, making it easier to use makes it easier for them to know they don't want it."
23. "The things that are the most fun are also the things that are most likely to kill you."
24. "If you're using vanity metrics to run your company, you're SOL."
25. "Vanity metrics are numbers put in a press release to make your competitors feel bad. Actionable metrics matter."
26. "Facebook is like a diamond mine. It is an attention mine. If you're not paying cash, YOU are the product."
27. "Facebook had a business model from day one, even when they had no revenue."
28. "The vision is not the helpful part. What matters are the details."
29. "Try to get someone to steal an idea from you, and you'll see how hard it is to steal an idea."
30. "Stealth kills startups. If you're doing it, stop."
31. "A startup is an institution designed to create something in the face of uncertainty."
32. "Planning and forecasting is the heart of modern management. Entrepreneurs don't manage by exceeding forecasts."
33. "Entrepreneurship is a management system for dealing with uncertainty."
34. "If you're developing a product that no one wants, why do you care if it's on time and on budget?"
35. "You know product-market fit when you see it. Develop a system to evaluate whether today was more successful than yesterday."
36. "Every startup starts with a vision to change the world for the better. If you create sustained value, you're succeeding."
37. @ericries: "I am to the point now where I cannot answer all my email." @investingmom: "I know."
38. "Entrepreneurship is about changing the world, making it better."
39. "Time-quality-money-pick-two is a consequence of waterfall process. It is a cultural choice."
40. "Culture is an artifact of process."
41. "When engineers aren't working hard enough, it's always a result of senior management or business strategy."
42. "I am a technical co-founder. I was always happy in that role. I don't want to be a CEO."
43. "It's called lean startup because of a theory called lean manufacturing. It explains why agile development works."
44. "It took us six months to build and six months to realize no one wanted it. That was too long."
45. "Continuous deployment was a crazy idea that didn't even have a name in 2004. It is a disciplined methodology of operating at speed."
46. "A thousand times more companies that do all the right things end up running the plane right into the ground."
47. @investingmom: "Eric is the one who came up with the term Pivot." @ericries "I'm sorry."
48. "Both in the dot com bubble and subsequently, everyone was telling us we were on track up until the day the company died."
49. "Once you get bit by the entrepreneurial bug, it's hard to let it go."

See also: The Lean Startup movement has only just begun.