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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

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Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#151

Post by Jtsummers »

dmix wrote: post #88
edoceo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""the baby with the bathwater by focusing on only doing things that had low option value and low risk. "" That's not what the Lean Startup says. Lean is about reducing risk but that doesn't box one into only doing low risk/value activity

What Lean says and how people commonly used it are distinct, which is what the OP is talking about. Some people took some parts of Lean too far and didn't focus enough on delivering a high level of value. That takes risk and vision, but you build better products. As opposed to obsessing over managing risk and keeping things lean, without properly investing in the hypothesis to really test them out. Which means in pra…

This is the same problem suffered by most Capital-N Named Things (Lean, Agile, etc.). By becoming capitalized, they become specific practices. Some of the practices are good, some are good in context, some are bad out of context. But people fail to make the proper value judgements about what's worth it and what's not, and often pick which practices to do by the visibility of the practice.

Is a kanban board useful? Immensely. Is it useful if you don't know what it represents? Nope. But it's highly visible so people adopt it. They may get some value, but only limited, if they fail to comprehend it. Or, worse, they get negative value because it becomes a set-in-stone "process" "(We can only handle 4 of X at a time! Scrap everything over that." "Wait, why was it 4?" "Oh, because we had half the staff before. I guess we can actually handle 6 now."). If that question isn't asked, it's fixed in time and the organization isn't a learning organization, it's actually dying but hasn't realized it yet.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#152

Post by salt-licker »

vkou wrote: post #148
salt-licker wrote: post #146

Overfunding is an existential risk for startups. Scaling a team before finding PMF seems like a blunder in most circumstances. Instead of setting your best engineers to work creating the best product, they're busy recruiting and dealing with company growing pains from the get-go. The mythical man-month and scarcity of great people combine to diminish your returns on this hiring. Furthermore, battleships don't turn on…

> Furthermore, huge funding means investors are looking for a huge returns. A $1b sale is now failure?? My gut says this "go big or go bankrupt" pressure encourages tunnel vision among leadership rather than innovation. If you don't take the money, they will go to your competitor, and give it to them instead. If you're in a space where you can be killed by your competitor selling $1 for 90 cents, that will kill you j…

Good point, I forgot to mention that "race to IPO and cash out" is a viable business strategy, though a sad product strategy. See A123 Systems, Desktop Metal's founder's previous company that went bankrupt. Also the Energous story: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2016/04/those-other-gu...

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#153

Post by Tloewald »

Is there a single example in business of someone taking a huge amount of money, and plopping a famous CEO in charge of a dozen people and saying "go" and generating a successful business? (Let's set aside investment funds, obviously. I guess Meg Whitman could just hire some iconoclastic traders and tell them to manage the $2B while her 10 staff clone YouTube.)

There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan and Byzantine super-soldiers) of a tiny band with no resources executing ludicrously successful military campaigns, so I guess it's not completely impossible.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#154

Post by dgudkov »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #123
dgudkov wrote: post #107

I'm not sure I understand this. You can't skip finding product/market fit. No matter how much money you have, if you have no product/market fit you're toast. If you're not desperate to find product/market fit (as Lean startups are) because you have tons of money -- you may never find it. To me, Lean startup is not about money. It's about building the most efficient process of finding product/market fit. Once you've f…

You can definitely skip product market fit. It takes some startups years to find true product market fit. The price of admission of product market fit is a great product and a great team. Hard to do these things on a budget, especially as the space of "cheap" startups that can be built with a few 100k becomes more crowded.

>It takes some startups years to find true product market fit.

I can think of only 3 reasons (not mutually exclusive) why it happened:

1. They had too much money which made their PMF search process inefficient.

2. They had to educate themselves about the market from scratch. Which means that the original idea was a wrong/uneducated guess.

3. They didn't find product/market fit. The same team had to restart with another idea (possibly several times) and it took them much less time than several years to find PMF.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#155

Post by pjlegato »

Tloewald wrote: post #153

Is there a single example in business of someone taking a huge amount of money, and plopping a famous CEO in charge of a dozen people and saying "go" and generating a successful business? (Let's set aside investment funds, obviously. I guess Meg Whitman could just hire some iconoclastic traders and tell them to manage the $2B while her 10 staff clone YouTube.) There are quasi-legendary cases in history (think Spartan…

Fairchild Semiconductor, or Intel?

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#156

Post by vonmoltke »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #133
awvcs wrote: post #37

I wish it wasn't so but I do think to the degree you can declare something dead the lean startup is. The problem is that lean startups requires a number of things that aren't accessible anymore. A) Maybe the most important is time. You need time in a good environment to actually develop something. Which has become a lot more costly. B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulat…

With C - plenty of cheap talent around the globe, even in developed countries. There must be some way to arbitrage this.

Plenty of cheap talent in the US as well, if so many startups weren't so delusional as to think they need Google-level talent.

Oh, and the thing about making them move to San Francisco. Not even just the greater Bay Area, which is bad enough, but to the most expensive part of it.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#157

Post by pjlegato »

dasil003 wrote: post #145
AndrewWarner wrote: post #64

The problem I see with the Lean Startup is that Eric Ries isn’t actively promoting, defending and explaining it. On Mixergy, I interview founders who try to make their bones or get attention for their messages by disagreeing with the Lean approach. Eric doesn’t debate, correct or engage with them. So they get to make statements without anyone credible taking them on. Listen to my latest interview it’s Rand Fishkin an…

This is a common pattern with all good ideas. You start with some hard-won ideas and principles that make a lot of sense. The ideas resonate and so they get picked up by a broader and broader set of people. Before long you have second and third tier advocates who are heavy on the Dunning-Kruger effect and short on actual insight. Now you have tons of straw-men for wannabe thought-leaders to rip apart mercilessly. I d…

There should be a name for this pattern, so we can easily refer to it in the future. As you say, it's quite common in business.

The Diluted Insight Effect?

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#158

Post by ben_jones »

You don't have to follow SV stereotypes

The lean startup is alive in well in most entrepreneurial ventures. Starting a food truck? Grocery store? Custom t-shirts? Indie video game? Small focused SaaS?

The echo chamber is real. "I looked outside and saw no lean startups, its dead!"

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#159

Post by btilly »

beamatronic wrote: post #144
ryandrake wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops. As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and…

Amen. If I knew something like ColdFusion I would be making web apps and starting businesses constantly, I love to solve user problems.

Nothing is stopping you from learning ColdFusion. Websites built in it will still work just fine. The fact that everyone else is doing complicated stuff doesn't mean that you have to.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#160

Post by kurtiswhite »

sandworm101 wrote: post #116
simias wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry. Sure but my point is more general: if I create a new lean web-like protocol and client and it can…

I hate when my phone wastes my time loading junk. A browser that couldn't even try, that couldn't be tricked into doing so, would find a market imho.

The Brave browser (https://brave.com/) is an attempt to do exactly that.
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