Nicolás López’s Post

I like to think of Horizon as a Build–Measure–Learn loop for enterprise transformation… Last week, I had the opportunity to meet Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, in San Francisco. If I had to choose between meeting a president or meeting Eric Ries, I’d choose Eric Ries every time. If you've ever built a startup, you've probably come across his ideas: MVP, pivots, continuous validation, and validated learning. Today, they feel like common sense, but when they first emerged, they were considered radical. Ries shared how, when he first applied these principles, many investors rejected his company because "it didn’t follow best practices." At the time, the standard approach was to plan five years ahead, raise as much money as possible, and launch a big, polished product—without testing assumptions first. If you failed, you failed slowly and expensively. Today, we know that the ability to iterate quickly, measure every change, and learn faster than the competition is what really makes the difference. But when Lean Startup first introduced this, it challenged an entire industry. A few ideas that stuck with me: "The only thing the startup has that is of value is learning about its future outcomes. Nothing else it does, not the customers it has, not the contracts, not the software, nothing is of any value whatsoever except the learning." One of my favorite ideas is "Innovation Accounting", a methodology that measures a startup’s progress not by how much it builds, but by how much it learns. As Ries explained, startups shouldn’t be measured by their number of users, contracts, or product features. Instead, they should focus on testing their most critical assumptions as quickly as possible. It’s amazing to see how his philosophy didn’t just change the software world—it’s now applicable to any industry. From hardware startups to AI-powered companies (like Horizon), the real competitive advantage remains the same: the speed of learning. If building a startup feels "easier" today than 15 years ago, it's because people like Eric Ries changed how we think about innovation. Lean Startup isn’t just about software—it’s about how we navigate uncertainty. Thank you, Eric, for sharing your vision and for challenging the mindset of "this is how it's always been done." Look to the Horizon... So thankful to Jeff Lawson, Robert Williams and Lindsey Li from Bessemer Venture Partners for generating this space.