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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

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Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#91

Post by normo12 »

keithwhor wrote: post #78
normo12 wrote: post #41

How much equity do you need to give away to get VC money for an unproven business idea? Is there a ballpark figure? I heard like $100k for 20% or something but I guess that's more like angel investing? What's the minimum amount of work you need to do before getting money with no track record as a founder?

Until a startup is obviously a billion-dollar entity (reasonably on track towards $100M+ ARR), it varies greatly based upon; - Growth metrics (MoM, YoY) - Following, absolute metrics - How these metrics compare to others in your vertical - Business thesis - Total market size (needs to be gigantic) - Strength of vision, ability to execute - Ability to convince others of said vision - Ability to attract, recruit and re…

That's really helpful, thanks.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#92

Post by dmix »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #74

I thought the whole idea of the "lean" methodology is not to waste the dollars you raise. Even if you have raised $2 billion, shouldn't you know if people want short form content? Actually, isn't it more important to know if people want it if you have a lot of money you spend? Can't you still launch an MVP quickly, and iterate up and then pour on the rocket fuel? This idea that scarce capital is what made lean startu…

> Even if you have raised $2 billion, shouldn't you know if people want short form content?

This has already been proven with Youtube.

The bigger question is whether there is a ~$100 billion market for a Netflix style service selling 10min videos, which justify a $1-2 billion investment. And whether this company can recruit the talent in a sustainable business model, where they can produce enough good content to keep users happy.

Even if there is a $100 million dollar business here, that would be a failure scenario for this startup right out of the gate. As it won't return the investor money anytime soon.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#93

Post by ryandrake »

simias wrote: post #49
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…

>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. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to…

> 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 said, “you know, this software needs to be as complex as possible!”

Yet we keep building complex software. Layer after layer of libraries and APIs. Frameworks and more frameworks. Containers. Multiple languages. Front end and back end. Machine learning. Problems that used to be solved on a PC now require a 150 node cluster.

It’s fashionable to throw huge teams, hardware and middleware at problems these days.

There is still opportunity for the lone coder and the lean startup. You need the competence to stop writing all these bullshit layers and code simply.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#94

Post by startupdiscuss »

village-idiot wrote: post #86
startupdiscuss wrote: post #79

I should also point out why the "Lean Startup" is more relevant than ever: Theranos. (The other story trending in hacker news). After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible). If this is the case, the "lean…

An interesting theory. I don’t know what to think about Holmes. At this point she thinks she just did what every other (male) startup founder did, and that she’s getting singled out for punishment when plenty of other startups over promised and under delivered. She doesn’t seem to grasp that flopping on some shitty social media site is far lower stakes than lying about medical issues, which makes me question her ethi…

I have not seen her current response to the situation.

Does she hold out examples? I don't know of any under delivery of this magnitude. (I think even webvan peaked at $4.8 Billion in value. It eventually had peak sales of $178million).

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#95

Post by startupdiscuss »

mediaman wrote: post #90
startupdiscuss wrote: post #79

I should also point out why the "Lean Startup" is more relevant than ever: Theranos. (The other story trending in hacker news). After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible). If this is the case, the "lean…

Theranos's problem seems to be that they (especially Holmes) would not bend on technical issues that would have allowed them to build a functioning product. It sounds like if they had allowed the machine to be a little bigger, and if they had compromised on being able to take a little more blood (instead of the one drop they had been marketing), they could have had a real machine that would produce reliable results.…

That is a good point on the size of the machine.

It would be crazy -- I mean in a cosmic way, not talking about any particular person -- if it were possible to get a decent MVP if it were slightly larger and took in slightly more blood.

The book implied this might have been possible, but it was not clear to me.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#96

Post by simias »

dri_ft wrote: post #61
simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to…

> Like this story I remember reading on HN of the hacker who managed to write a task switching application for some Apple computer of the time and managed to sell it to Steve Jobs (I don't remember all the details and I can't find the article at the moment). https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

That's it, thank you!

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#97

Post by Reedx »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #79

I should also point out why the "Lean Startup" is more relevant than ever: Theranos. (The other story trending in hacker news). After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible). If this is the case, the "lean…

> After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible).

I suspect that's the case too. Especially considering she didn't take money off the table.

It seems she was completely invested in the idea of fake it till you make it. Dangerously so.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#99

Post by im_down_w_otp »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #79

I should also point out why the "Lean Startup" is more relevant than ever: Theranos. (The other story trending in hacker news). After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible). If this is the case, the "lean…

It's hard to find investors who will invest in just "the tech". Even in cases where it's clear to basically everyone that the structure of the market, the profile of the customer, and the size or depth of the problem necessitate pursuing a technology strategy and not a product strategy out of the gate (and possibly for a long, long time).

Even at early-stage investment, if you don't have a really specific product narrative doing a sound-bite sized thing, you'll get a lot of feedback about how it all needs to be very simple and you need to have a specific product definition.

This is not a defense if Theranos, but rather just some insight into the ways that VC preferences, pattern-matching, and fairly simplistic capacity to vet anything through a "pitch" tend to distort how one goes about raising money and what one can reasonably raise money for. There probably needs to be some increased diversity in funding sources for "hard tech" problems.

The issue I've always had with the concept of "MVP" is that it trivializes the problem space you can reasonably pursue, and collapses all the solutions into something you can throw together quickly, which also seriously distorts the incentives for rigor around making anything.

It probably works fine for another Daily-Lifestyle-Thing-as-a-Service/App, but it seems less likely to work for something like creating a new sensor for an avionics system.

Re: Is the Lean Startup Dead?

#100

Post by simias »

sandworm101 wrote: post #66
simias wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. >B) Large companies are controlling more areas than ever. People often wary of regulation as a barrier, but as time goes by the market participants creates their own barriers. Many areas are just harder to…

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. The gaming industry still has room for lone coders to make a difference. Many of the top indi games…

> 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't display videos, feature interactive content, arbitrary styles etc... How do I drive adoption?

I can convince the suckless folks that "less is more" and that it's "the unix way" but outside of that circle I'm not sure who's going to use my software.

All software seems to be going in the opposite direction. For instance I'm a heavy user of IRC, these days the type of communities you could find on QuakeNet 15 years ago are on Discord, a super heavy webchat client that manages to slow down my beefy desktop computer when run on pre-quantom Firefox. The Discord client is probably several times heavier on resource usage than the Quake game itself!

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