><i>"Indeed, one of the most successful teams in Y Combinator’s 2011 class ripped up its business plan eight weeks through the 12-week program, switched to a different industry, and wound up raising $2.5 million in funding"</i><p>And then...what?<p>I guess I'll never understand how, in this world, getting funded is some sort of end. Getting funded means you now have the cash to become a real business, rather than having a two-man team eating ramen and sleeping on the floor. But it's still only the <i>beginning</i>. What proportion of funded startups end up failing? I'll fathom it's a lot. And if you get funded, then flame out, are you a success?
I know it's not the main point of the article, but far too many articles these days seem to dwell on the number of jobs that can be supported by any given startup.<p>The most amazing thing, to me, about technology is how it enables such small groups of people to positively affect millions. Lamenting that this is possible without hiring thousands of people seems like a such a narrow and scared mindset to me. It completely ignores huge swaths of possibility and potential.
Like "agile", "lean startup" can mean pretty much... anything the person using the phrase wants it to mean.<p>With agile, sometimes the word is used to justify a rigid excess of ceremony, or as a firewall for lazy developers to hide behind to avoid being responsive to non-engineering members of the organization, or as an unrealistic attempt to turn software development into an assembly line of a bunch of jack-of-all-trades "cross-functional" team members ("specialists? we don't need no stinkin' specialists!"). But the core observation of agile is that writing huge planning documents and spending weeks perfecting PRDs and GANTT charts at the outset of an engineering project and then using these to derive project timelines and costs is inefficient, and that "delivery to QA" 3 months over an arbitrary schedule and 70% over an arbitrary budget is a classic failure mode for this approach to planning. Instead, a focus on building self-organizing, trusted teams who are delivering working software frequently and iteratively, and gathering customer feedback and adjusting "the plan" after each delivered increment of software can result in both happier developers AND happier customers.<p>Similarly, "lean startup" CAN be synonymous with "changing my mind about what business I'm in and 'pivoting' every 3 weeks", but really the core observation could be summarized as "build things people want", with all these new-fangled buzzword-y tools like customer development interviews, business model canvases and even "pivoting" as a means to this end. While the Ries book is useful, Steve Blank's The Startup Owner's Manual (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step/dp/0984999302" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step...</a>) is <i>phenomenal</i> and the ideas there certainly "transfer very well outside the world of tech start-ups."<p>Take what works, leave what doesn't, ignore the hype and think critically.
Most entrepreneurs I've met want to "build a company, any company" rather than "follow their life-long vision". That might not be a bad thing.<p>Idea generation is a learnable skill, and once you can generate a bunch of viable ideas, you can select the best one. I think this is better than going with the first "brilliant insight" that pops into your head and deciding it's your lifelong passion.<p>Also, lean works outside of tech -- remember those infomercial products that took 6-8 weeks to order? That's because they didn't get the products built until they received enough orders. And while they might not change the world, AirBnB, Heroku, Dropbox, Reddit, GoCardless, Exec et al. seem set to leave pretty big craters in it.
<i>He and his partner debated “pivoting” from one nascent business to the next, even as the clock ticked toward the all-important “Demo Day,” when they were to present their ideas to investors.</i><p><i>A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision. You cannot have a pivot without vision (that's just wandering around).</i><p><a href="https://twitter.com/ericries/status/221318901018017792" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ericries/status/221318901018017792</a>
<i>Mark Zuckerberg expressed this view at a Y Combinator event, chiding the crowd: “You’ve decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you’re passionate about yet.”</i><p>Wasn't Facebook an MVP that he put up primarily on a whim? Seems like he derived his "passion" from the fact that it was blowing up.<p>In fact, weren't Apple, Google ... etc built in a similar fashion? Maybe big vision works best once you have lots of resources and experience.
Saw this post this evening: <a href="http://nickoneill.com/building-a-plane-on-the-runway/" rel="nofollow">http://nickoneill.com/building-a-plane-on-the-runway/</a> - "pivoting" is a meaningful startup pattern when it means "variations on a theme", informed by data and quantitative customer discovery, rather than the the "am I building an iOS app to manage your pet rock collection, or Airbnb for dogs?" flailing which too often hides behind the label.