I'm not sure if I'm reading an opinion piece or an objective piece?
- Burn out? Not having sales and traction is what decides if you go home after you "go hard". Your staff burns out when they realize your reality distortion field was just hallucination and trying to fake it until you make it vooza style. Realizing startups are more about developing sales and marketing skills to find a channel to a market is the master key. This has nothing to do with lean imho. If anything, lean makes you look in the mirror and gut check more often if you're not hiding behind a keyboard.
- No Architecture? Having an architecture discussion starts with "Have you had any relationship with a code base longer than 2-3 years?" The architectural reality is the first version will change, because it'll largely be wrong. How much you plan for this is something you learn when developing any software. It's important to be kind to your future self and using enough tooling and structure that's useful, but not enough that it slows you down.I've never skipped architecture with MVPs or lean. I use light frameworks that keep me organized. Sinatra is one example, every language has one. Most importantly, I don't build my perfect empire the first go around, as a burning effigy to my brilliance to distract myself from the fact that I might not be developing as an entrepreneur to learn the sales and marketing skills to find users, or a business model.
- Investors: The day you take money, is the day you pretty much guarantee to ultimately sell and have less and less say in your company. Someone else is telling you when you go home after you go hard if founders can't figure out to make a business model out of the startup. This has zero to do with lean, if anything being the master of your own destiny is being profitable so you can have a say on doing things your own way. Being able to have more of a say in your own destiny, lean, or no lean is more about the founders and the business, sales and marketing skills that may not exist, and whether they're doing anything to learn about it.
Disclaimer: I'm a software, project and product guy from a background in lean via implementing tech in manufacturing.
I got to spend almost 10 years learning from, implementing, and re-implementing lean in a factory perspective (adding software to the process) to really have a tiny glimpse of how lean made companies like Toyota what they are since the 60's. If we look at lean on it's own, and drop startup from it for a second, lean works.
Translating lean to the startup world will only make startups into more of a science where it's an art. Like science, it should evolve, it's not perfect, but less perfect is a lack of process. I don't think the author is advocating for this at all, but in knocking lean, I would have loved to hear the steps and processes he learnt that did work for him in his scenarios.
Applying lean to the startup world is special for startups, not for lean.
For me, lean is learning to look forward and take fewer wrong steps, and to learn quicker, but to always be learning. Not using lean is like looking back and saying out of the 100 things I did, I wish I knew to find the five or 10 I needed. Lean helps narrow it down a great deal to get you on your way, but by no means is it the instant, perfect formula.
Lean tells me to shut up. Every idea, thought, innovation, revolution I have, to shut up, and simply try it and test it to see if it's something people want, hopefully enough to pay to keep me on my path of learning.
Having a business model, users, customers and making money might not be what everyone's out to do, but if it is what you're out to do, lean is definitely one way to get there.