Most likely the audacious ideas like rocket to Mars come from Elon Musk and, Elon has the track record to not have to go lean.. If Rajesh proposed a rocket to mars, security will be called. But Elon must have also broken down spaceX to a process of validating some definition of MVP (power sub systems, insulation, inertial navigation and other fancy terms) that adds to the final product.. Overall I feel Erics lean startup approach is much more reliable that the deterministic approach used by investors to pick the winner based on how young the team is, since when they coded, where they dropped out off and how much in the fringe the idea is..
Another thing unsaid about the Lean Startup approach is that it seems to heavily favor software startups, almost to the point that it is more of a manual for a software/web startup than any other type of company. In creating a vertically-integrated retail brand, for example, there's very little margin for error and iteration bandwidth in the initial stages. You really need to do your homework, understand the market, and design a great product to truly make an impact. Scraping the surface with shabby clothes at high prices just to get a feel for the market, for example, doesn't work. In many industries, true product-market fit can only be proven at scale. Man-power tests don't always work in the early stages.
I do lots of work with musicians and I think the LS approach is incredibly applicable to them.
So many bands go into the studio and spend tons of money recording a very polished full length album and getting CDs pressed before they even break 1,000 likes on Facebook.
It makes no sense to spend so much time and money before they know if they are a band that people will like or if they will even stay together long enough for the album to remain relevant.
I talk to Patrick Vlaskovits a decent amount as he is in the final stages of finishing a book about the lean methodology (leanentrepreneur.co). The thing that always really makes these discussions interesting to me is how many examples of lean he has from more traditional industries that he's featuring in the book. E.g. using a pop-up kitchen as a way to test a new restaurant idea, etc.
Whether or not you should adopt a lean startup/pivot approach is based on your view of the world, and how you fit in it.
Peter Thiel wrote a great article[1] about this.
In a nutshell, for the purpose of this topic, you can divide the world into two axis: optimistic/pessimistic & determinate/indeterminate.
If you are optimistic and indeterminate, then the Lean Startup method is for you. You think there is an answer (somewhere), but you don't think you can know it ahead of time. Your company won't create products like the iPhone, but it will discover niches like AirBNB did through trial and error.
My own company, Fohr, is firmly in the optimistic/deterministic camp, as am I. Trying to "find" a market, pivoting endlessly, etc. are not for us. We already know what we want to build, and the only "customer" we have to please, ultimately, is me, and I've known the essence of our company/product since the late 90s, when I first came up with the idea at Siggraph. The only "pivoting" we've done is to accomplish that vision in technical terms (aka, R&D), not to determine if "people want it" or if there's a market.
Maybe I'm just too stubborn to pivot, but I'd like to think it's because I'm optimistic and believe the world is knowable and the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so that's what I'm doing. I suspect Elon Musk feels the same way.
That Peter Thiel essay is brilliant! I can't resist a brief quote:
Any company with a good secret plan will always be undervalued in a world where nobody believes in secrets and nobody believes in plans. The ability to execute against a long-term secret plan is thus incredibly powerful and important.
I did not know Thiel had such interesting things to say. I will seek out more of his writings now.
I know there are different definitions of pivoting going around, so much so that it has essentially lost its meaning. But I just wanted to point out that most lean startup definitions of pivot I have read involve the overall vision remaining consistent. That sounds a lot like what you've been doing, although your pivots are dictated primarily by what you want, and lean startup pivots would be dictated primarily by previous experimentation. Put another way, your pivots are more offensive in nature (i.e. charging toward the goal) and lean startup pivots are more defensive in nature (i.e. mitigating risk when an initial charge doesn't pan out).
EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.
What I was trying to say is that I don't try and answer those two questions by "pivoting", in the Lean Startup sense.
I do answer those questions, but I do it in an optimistic, deterministic way, which is to create a narrative for our company, its product, sales, service, pricing, etc. and then step back and evaluate the narrative. I run the narrative by people I know (not strangers), and see how they respond. This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust.
I iterate like crazy, and I'm constantly tweaking things (as anyone who knows me will tell you). But I do it from the worldview, if you will, that I can risk many years and capital and release a product or service into the world, iPhone-like, and get the result I anticipated in my narrative.
I'm confident that's true because I'm constantly developing narratives on a smaller scale, and testing them. I'm not always right, but I'm right about enough things, enough of the time, that I feel confident basing my company's vision on that.
I thought so too when I first heard about Eric Reis' Lean Startup, and even went and implemented a bunch of his stuff.
I ended up eliminating his practices, because they didn't fit. I think the resemblance is superficial, but it could just be me who did it wrong. I do know that when I dropped his approach, my process improved a lot.
If I had to guess, I'd say that his approach is too reliant on past-looking data (e.g, the results of an A/B test), and not reliant enough on the ability to project an outcome into the future and actually hit the outcome with any kind of confidence.
I work far better, and have far better success, when I bring the outcome I want into reality, vs. testing a bunch of hypothesis and trying to divine which worked, without any understanding of why, other than the A/B test indicated people liked this shade of blue.
Also, orienting my company so that it could "pivot" based on the analysis essentially crippled productivity, because so much energy is spent on being able to pivot (e.g. huge unit test suites, continuous deployment, etc.) that very little business value is being created for the end user. The whole thing was actually a huge waste, the opposite of what "lean" is supposed to be about, ironically.
Since we use everything we create in house, it's very obvious when actual value isn't being created, and pivoting, A/B tests, and the like gave essentially useless results, or at best, trivial results, and produced no value.
That's why we dropped it.
I didn't understand why it didn't work for us until I read Thiel's axis of startups, and discovered that Reis' approach isn't targeted at companies or people like me.
I think his goals are fine (really, does anyone disagree with them?), but his practices only apply to specific kinds of people/companies, in my experience. You can keep the goals, change the practices, and it'll remain relevant for people like me and the companies we run.
Because it's pretty clear that people can and do project without any data. For example, Apple hadn't sold a single phone, and Steve Jobs went up on stage and said that Apple expected to sell 10 million iPhones.
Apple did ZERO market research. It was basic Jobs saying, "yeah, this'll sell" based on his own estimation. And it did.
I'm not Steve Jobs, but I also don't need historical data to project sales into the future, and be reasonably accurate when doing so.
What I do, and what I suspect Jobs did, is (a) see if the product/service resonates with me personally, and (b) most importantly, see if there is a narrative for the product/service that can be communicated to, and accepted by, large numbers of people. If I can't develop a narrative, I don't believe the product/service will succeed and I work on something else.
The ability to determine a narrative that'll work ahead of time is what makes the forward-looking approach work. If you can't do that with any kind of consistency, you should do Ries' approach, IMO.
I'm a writer/filmmaker at heart, and have spent many years getting good at story/narrative. So that's a really comfortable way to do things for myself and my company.
I think the point about being to willing to call something a failure is a good one. It is important to be "Ok" with failing but it is also important to be honest with yourself in terms of whether or not you gave it everything you had to give.
"Not every startup should"... complete that sentence with almost anything and it will be true.
Rather than a bunch of articles on different topics, I hope we can just agree that there isn't one rule fits all or we would all follow that rule and be successful.
It's exactly why you can't just copy how someone else does things and hope to get the same result.
I dunno. Testing their ideas by the cheapest possible procedure seems like something that every startup should. Maybe there are exceptions, but that's not obvious at all.
It's ok that sometimes the cheapest possible option is still quite expensive. That isn't reason to use anything more expensive.
It is also true that not all startups that do it will succeed, and that not all startups that don't do it will fail. But it looks like the kind of thing that will increase the chances of any startup, not just a subset of them.
We see Lean Startup methodologiy being used innapropriately as an excuse to not take sales and marketing seriously,” he said. “Founders tell us that all that matters is product, and sales and market will happen automatically. The ‘if they build it it will come,’” mantra, which he noted is not always an acceptable approach for those looking to grow.
I thought the Lean Startup was based on customer development... These "founders" are doing it wrong.
The core of the lean startup is the application of the scientific method to systematically and consistently gain knowledge about product/market fit. The scientific method is the only reliable way for gaining knowledge about the natural world that has been discovered in all of history. Only a kook would argue against it. Luckily that's not what Marc Andreessen argues.
Marc seems to believe that the Lean Startup approach is not applicable to "audacious" ideas, citing the Macintosh. This is, of course, not the case. The scale of a project might make experimentation more costly, or more difficult, but it still occurs. For example, the Macintosh was preceded by the Lisa. Apple learned from the Lisa (too complex, too slow) and hence the Mac was simpler. Sometimes experimentation occurs not at a company level but at an industry level. To use Apple again, the early experiments leading up the iPhone were performed by Apple (Newton, iTunes Phone), Palm, and RIM. It's not like the iPhone sprung fully formed into an empty market, much as Apple would like you to believe this.
Markets (and decisions in general) are hugely influenced by emotions. We are far far away from having anything scientific of much practical importance in these areas. Anyone deluding oneself with an idea of a rational market is well, delusional.
The Lean Startup has nothing to do with rational markets. It is about using the scientific method to acquire and interpret information from the market. This does not presuppose the market is rational in the way (some) economics does.
Proponents of the Lean Startup Theory like to cite startups of the past as successes of their theory. That strikes me as dubious. For the theory to be sound it must have predictive value. Where are the great companies that have been built by people consciously taking the theory and applying it? It seems that there aren't any. If there were, advocates wouldn't need this practice of retroactive baptism.
It doesn't follow that the theory is wrong, but there is a large gap between results attributable to it and the grandiose claims being made. Wouldn't the true scientific attitude be to hold off claiming to have a science of startups until significant results have first been produced, then reproduced?
A lot of people badly want this theory to be true. It's easy to see why; it says it is a method to success — not only that, but a quasi-scientific method that has tremendous appeal to the technically minded. But the fact that the desire to believe the theory is so strong is not evidence in its favor; it's reason for doubt.
I'm skeptical of the theory for two reasons. The first is that I keep feeling like I've seen it before, in another risk-ridden field where people badly want a reliable way to get results: the field of corporate software projects. Failure and unpredictability are so common there that people are eager to buy the idea of a repeatable process. Lean Startup Theory seems very much like software process transplanted to startups – so much so, in fact, that a more accurate name for it might be Startup Process. I could be wrong about this, but the sense of deja vu is striking.
If that's a correct analysis, it's possible to describe what it would look like. One would expect to see social clubs of believers who share techniques and inspiring stories about how their process is working. One would expect not to see any decisive outcomes, though people will expend great energy interpreting all outcomes as evidence for their process. One would expect to see gurus and consultants selling the answers that people are so eager for, whether they work or not. (In some cases it's better when they don't work, since one can then sell them repeatedly.) One would expect the gurus and consultants not to have any significant track record of success in the areas that they're teaching, since that's not actually what they're good at. And one would expect many people's desire to believe the theory to be strong enough for them to overlook that anomaly.
The other reason I'm skeptical is that, if the theory is true, it would amount to a science of history. There's nothing intrinsically different between startups and historical undertakings; that's all the word "enterprise" means, after all. Most don't lead anywhere, while a few lead somewhere important. An empirical technique to create the important ones would amount to an empirical technique to create history. That seems unlikely.
In college I took a class in engineering business management. Many of the things I learned in that class made a lot of sense, so I certainly wouldn't deride the teaching of how business works in general.
It seemed to me that every management technique (lean, kanban, kaizen, six sigma, prince2) came with a high profile success story attributed to it. That's reasonable enough. But every time a management technique also had a high profile failure story at a second company, it was never attributed to a failing of the system; it was that the second company hadn't believed in it hard enough. If only they'd completely gone for broke, throwing caution to the wind, it would have worked!
The bias towards only seeing the good in these techniques made it jolly difficult to choose between them when they offered contradictory advice.
> For the [Lean Startup] theory to be sound it must
> have predictive value
When did the Lean Startup method become the Guaranteed Startup Success method? My understanding is that Lean methods encourage startups to build short feedback loops to the things they're trying to accomplish: Capturing market, building the product, etc. The short feedback loops let the company know quickly whether their efforts are showing signs of success, and whether they should keep at it, or change their strategy. This is one of the points that Andressen is critical of, as well: Know when you're attacking a difficult problem and you won't get quick feedback.
I'd rather hear an answer to the main point: if the theory is so good, where are the great companies that have been created by people consciously applying it? (Of course, if it's just about listening to feedback, that's something that anybody competent would do, and hardly a new approach to building startups.)
Lean Startup is not about building trivial things and not hiring sales people. It's about testing business assumptions. And it can work for any type of business, even non-technical businesses and companies with ambitious goals.
The "Lean" in Lean Startup does not mean "Don't Spend Money". It's a reference to Lean Manufacturing, and it's about not wasting resources. Waste in manufacturing come from things like excess inventory, needless movement of people and parts, and excessive defects. In software it's things like developing features users don't want, or onerous release processes.
A lot of people think Lean Startup is all about the Minimum Viable Product, and if the project is too ambitious for a little MVP you can't use Lean Startup. But that's not true. The MVP is about testing business assumptions; your leaps of faith.
Here is an example of an ambitious project, the kind that will take years to develop:
Lets say you want to build something like Google Spanner/F1. A globally consistent database with rich query capabilities and reasonably low latency. Do you release minimal versions to test if people want it? No, you can't. Minimal versions exist. We have globally inconsistent, or rich query, or low latency databases already.
You have to do the market research and decide that if you build it there will be a market. Your testing of business assumptions comes later, after you develop it.
For example, do you sell it as a hardware appliance? I say that's probably a bad idea, the companies using that sort of database aren't big on proprietary hardware. What about packaging it as proprietary software? Maybe, plenty of companies buy proprietary databases. But banks aren't early adopters (except Deutsche Bank), and you'll miss "the next Facebook" during their early development/growth phase. What about releasing it as open source and making money off support and services? I think you'll get the startups using it, and once they grow a little I think enough will pay to make the business profitable.
But those are all my business assumptions. Those are the things that need testing. Maybe hardware appliances are what the market really wants. But if they aren't (and you assumed they were) you would be wasting money developing hardware. Maybe it's not tech companies that want this, but actually banks that would love a hardware appliance. Or scientific research institutions with big budgets that are happy to use proprietary software.
You can use Lean Startup methodologies in any company and in any part of the development phase.
I recently finished a full, end-to-end business plan on a product/service that, at its core, relies on my own company's in-house Google Spanner-like technology, so your example hit pretty close to home. I will say that globally-consistent distributed transactions is a game changer, IMO.
We have, indeed, spent many years on the technology, and as I said, we did it because we had an in-house need, not with an intent to sell. But now we're extracting it (and other, complementary tech, which separately took years) and making the bundle available as an integrated product/service to third parties in 2013.
We didn't end up with any of the business plans you mentioned, but I think the one we did devise is novel enough that I can imagine it being used as a case study in business school in the future (hopefully on the "success" side).
I've developed literally hundreds of business plans over the years, virtually all in the $100 million+ startup category, and this one was by far the most fun I've had designing one, and I also think has the best chance of succeeding.
(I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual approach we're taking until we launch the product/service.)
Andreessen's counter-argument to lean really needs to be put out there. As in all trends, people take a popular concept like lean too far and adopt it by default (instead of by its fundamental merits).
Of course lean has worked well. Especially when it was the hungry rat or roach to the 90s dinosaur. But people are getting complacent in this success, and increasingly chicken-shit to do something really difficult and time-consuming.
And there are a lot of skittish roaches and rats running around the tech scene now. The startups types just out of college saw Social Network and they think its easy, ha ha. Time for a new kind of beast to rise, a bigger one that does not suffer from startup-ADD and requires a lot more intellectual and financial resources to grow.
I've been working on some hellish shit, pushing myself to the very limit of what I can do after 15 years of programming. A lot of people won't touch difficult now. But difficult or not-on-trend or unseen advantage is what good investing is all about.
It seemed risky to people with self-programmed assumptions to do lean in the early-to-mid-naughts. It seems risky to do a big beast now. But investing is finding some edge, that is one great way to increase your chances to win.
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[ 1155 ms ] story [ 1016 ms ] threadSo many bands go into the studio and spend tons of money recording a very polished full length album and getting CDs pressed before they even break 1,000 likes on Facebook.
It makes no sense to spend so much time and money before they know if they are a band that people will like or if they will even stay together long enough for the album to remain relevant.
Yep, the advices on the Lean Startup gides is quite directed at software, but it is an specialization of a more general idea.
Peter Thiel wrote a great article[1] about this.
In a nutshell, for the purpose of this topic, you can divide the world into two axis: optimistic/pessimistic & determinate/indeterminate.
If you are optimistic and indeterminate, then the Lean Startup method is for you. You think there is an answer (somewhere), but you don't think you can know it ahead of time. Your company won't create products like the iPhone, but it will discover niches like AirBNB did through trial and error.
My own company, Fohr, is firmly in the optimistic/deterministic camp, as am I. Trying to "find" a market, pivoting endlessly, etc. are not for us. We already know what we want to build, and the only "customer" we have to please, ultimately, is me, and I've known the essence of our company/product since the late 90s, when I first came up with the idea at Siggraph. The only "pivoting" we've done is to accomplish that vision in technical terms (aka, R&D), not to determine if "people want it" or if there's a market.
Maybe I'm just too stubborn to pivot, but I'd like to think it's because I'm optimistic and believe the world is knowable and the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so that's what I'm doing. I suspect Elon Musk feels the same way.
[1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels...
Any company with a good secret plan will always be undervalued in a world where nobody believes in secrets and nobody believes in plans. The ability to execute against a long-term secret plan is thus incredibly powerful and important.
I did not know Thiel had such interesting things to say. I will seek out more of his writings now.
EDIT: It turns out the definition of lean startup pivot I was aware of is just Eric Ries' interpretation. So I'm wrong.
According to my world view, this is suicidal. Can you explain it to me from your world view?
I do answer those questions, but I do it in an optimistic, deterministic way, which is to create a narrative for our company, its product, sales, service, pricing, etc. and then step back and evaluate the narrative. I run the narrative by people I know (not strangers), and see how they respond. This allows me to identify problems with the vision (aka narrative), and adjust.
I iterate like crazy, and I'm constantly tweaking things (as anyone who knows me will tell you). But I do it from the worldview, if you will, that I can risk many years and capital and release a product or service into the world, iPhone-like, and get the result I anticipated in my narrative.
I'm confident that's true because I'm constantly developing narratives on a smaller scale, and testing them. I'm not always right, but I'm right about enough things, enough of the time, that I feel confident basing my company's vision on that.
This iteration (or small "pivot" if you will) seem identical to the "lean" idea.
I ended up eliminating his practices, because they didn't fit. I think the resemblance is superficial, but it could just be me who did it wrong. I do know that when I dropped his approach, my process improved a lot.
If I had to guess, I'd say that his approach is too reliant on past-looking data (e.g, the results of an A/B test), and not reliant enough on the ability to project an outcome into the future and actually hit the outcome with any kind of confidence.
I work far better, and have far better success, when I bring the outcome I want into reality, vs. testing a bunch of hypothesis and trying to divine which worked, without any understanding of why, other than the A/B test indicated people liked this shade of blue.
Also, orienting my company so that it could "pivot" based on the analysis essentially crippled productivity, because so much energy is spent on being able to pivot (e.g. huge unit test suites, continuous deployment, etc.) that very little business value is being created for the end user. The whole thing was actually a huge waste, the opposite of what "lean" is supposed to be about, ironically.
Since we use everything we create in house, it's very obvious when actual value isn't being created, and pivoting, A/B tests, and the like gave essentially useless results, or at best, trivial results, and produced no value.
That's why we dropped it.
I didn't understand why it didn't work for us until I read Thiel's axis of startups, and discovered that Reis' approach isn't targeted at companies or people like me.
I think his goals are fine (really, does anyone disagree with them?), but his practices only apply to specific kinds of people/companies, in my experience. You can keep the goals, change the practices, and it'll remain relevant for people like me and the companies we run.
Things like continuous deployment allow you to move quickly, whether you're pivoting or not.
I also can't see how A/B tests fit into this. They seem like they're orthogonal at best to everything else.
Me personally? Or anyone?
Because it's pretty clear that people can and do project without any data. For example, Apple hadn't sold a single phone, and Steve Jobs went up on stage and said that Apple expected to sell 10 million iPhones.
Apple did ZERO market research. It was basic Jobs saying, "yeah, this'll sell" based on his own estimation. And it did.
I'm not Steve Jobs, but I also don't need historical data to project sales into the future, and be reasonably accurate when doing so.
What I do, and what I suspect Jobs did, is (a) see if the product/service resonates with me personally, and (b) most importantly, see if there is a narrative for the product/service that can be communicated to, and accepted by, large numbers of people. If I can't develop a narrative, I don't believe the product/service will succeed and I work on something else.
The ability to determine a narrative that'll work ahead of time is what makes the forward-looking approach work. If you can't do that with any kind of consistency, you should do Ries' approach, IMO.
I'm a writer/filmmaker at heart, and have spent many years getting good at story/narrative. So that's a really comfortable way to do things for myself and my company.
That's so refreshing to hear these days.
Rather than a bunch of articles on different topics, I hope we can just agree that there isn't one rule fits all or we would all follow that rule and be successful.
It's exactly why you can't just copy how someone else does things and hope to get the same result.
It's ok that sometimes the cheapest possible option is still quite expensive. That isn't reason to use anything more expensive.
It is also true that not all startups that do it will succeed, and that not all startups that don't do it will fail. But it looks like the kind of thing that will increase the chances of any startup, not just a subset of them.
I thought the Lean Startup was based on customer development... These "founders" are doing it wrong.
Marc seems to believe that the Lean Startup approach is not applicable to "audacious" ideas, citing the Macintosh. This is, of course, not the case. The scale of a project might make experimentation more costly, or more difficult, but it still occurs. For example, the Macintosh was preceded by the Lisa. Apple learned from the Lisa (too complex, too slow) and hence the Mac was simpler. Sometimes experimentation occurs not at a company level but at an industry level. To use Apple again, the early experiments leading up the iPhone were performed by Apple (Newton, iTunes Phone), Palm, and RIM. It's not like the iPhone sprung fully formed into an empty market, much as Apple would like you to believe this.
It doesn't follow that the theory is wrong, but there is a large gap between results attributable to it and the grandiose claims being made. Wouldn't the true scientific attitude be to hold off claiming to have a science of startups until significant results have first been produced, then reproduced?
A lot of people badly want this theory to be true. It's easy to see why; it says it is a method to success — not only that, but a quasi-scientific method that has tremendous appeal to the technically minded. But the fact that the desire to believe the theory is so strong is not evidence in its favor; it's reason for doubt.
I'm skeptical of the theory for two reasons. The first is that I keep feeling like I've seen it before, in another risk-ridden field where people badly want a reliable way to get results: the field of corporate software projects. Failure and unpredictability are so common there that people are eager to buy the idea of a repeatable process. Lean Startup Theory seems very much like software process transplanted to startups – so much so, in fact, that a more accurate name for it might be Startup Process. I could be wrong about this, but the sense of deja vu is striking.
If that's a correct analysis, it's possible to describe what it would look like. One would expect to see social clubs of believers who share techniques and inspiring stories about how their process is working. One would expect not to see any decisive outcomes, though people will expend great energy interpreting all outcomes as evidence for their process. One would expect to see gurus and consultants selling the answers that people are so eager for, whether they work or not. (In some cases it's better when they don't work, since one can then sell them repeatedly.) One would expect the gurus and consultants not to have any significant track record of success in the areas that they're teaching, since that's not actually what they're good at. And one would expect many people's desire to believe the theory to be strong enough for them to overlook that anomaly.
The other reason I'm skeptical is that, if the theory is true, it would amount to a science of history. There's nothing intrinsically different between startups and historical undertakings; that's all the word "enterprise" means, after all. Most don't lead anywhere, while a few lead somewhere important. An empirical technique to create the important ones would amount to an empirical technique to create history. That seems unlikely.
It seemed to me that every management technique (lean, kanban, kaizen, six sigma, prince2) came with a high profile success story attributed to it. That's reasonable enough. But every time a management technique also had a high profile failure story at a second company, it was never attributed to a failing of the system; it was that the second company hadn't believed in it hard enough. If only they'd completely gone for broke, throwing caution to the wind, it would have worked!
The bias towards only seeing the good in these techniques made it jolly difficult to choose between them when they offered contradictory advice.
Good TL;DR .
Marc Andreessen notes that sometimes founders misappropriate the ideas or don’t apply them correctly
... but much less attention grabbing than the headline ;-)
Anybody, for example, who is ignoring sales and marketing is almost by definition not taking a Lean Startup approach.
The "Lean" in Lean Startup does not mean "Don't Spend Money". It's a reference to Lean Manufacturing, and it's about not wasting resources. Waste in manufacturing come from things like excess inventory, needless movement of people and parts, and excessive defects. In software it's things like developing features users don't want, or onerous release processes.
A lot of people think Lean Startup is all about the Minimum Viable Product, and if the project is too ambitious for a little MVP you can't use Lean Startup. But that's not true. The MVP is about testing business assumptions; your leaps of faith.
Here is an example of an ambitious project, the kind that will take years to develop:
Lets say you want to build something like Google Spanner/F1. A globally consistent database with rich query capabilities and reasonably low latency. Do you release minimal versions to test if people want it? No, you can't. Minimal versions exist. We have globally inconsistent, or rich query, or low latency databases already.
You have to do the market research and decide that if you build it there will be a market. Your testing of business assumptions comes later, after you develop it.
For example, do you sell it as a hardware appliance? I say that's probably a bad idea, the companies using that sort of database aren't big on proprietary hardware. What about packaging it as proprietary software? Maybe, plenty of companies buy proprietary databases. But banks aren't early adopters (except Deutsche Bank), and you'll miss "the next Facebook" during their early development/growth phase. What about releasing it as open source and making money off support and services? I think you'll get the startups using it, and once they grow a little I think enough will pay to make the business profitable.
But those are all my business assumptions. Those are the things that need testing. Maybe hardware appliances are what the market really wants. But if they aren't (and you assumed they were) you would be wasting money developing hardware. Maybe it's not tech companies that want this, but actually banks that would love a hardware appliance. Or scientific research institutions with big budgets that are happy to use proprietary software.
You can use Lean Startup methodologies in any company and in any part of the development phase.
I recently finished a full, end-to-end business plan on a product/service that, at its core, relies on my own company's in-house Google Spanner-like technology, so your example hit pretty close to home. I will say that globally-consistent distributed transactions is a game changer, IMO.
We have, indeed, spent many years on the technology, and as I said, we did it because we had an in-house need, not with an intent to sell. But now we're extracting it (and other, complementary tech, which separately took years) and making the bundle available as an integrated product/service to third parties in 2013.
We didn't end up with any of the business plans you mentioned, but I think the one we did devise is novel enough that I can imagine it being used as a case study in business school in the future (hopefully on the "success" side).
I've developed literally hundreds of business plans over the years, virtually all in the $100 million+ startup category, and this one was by far the most fun I've had designing one, and I also think has the best chance of succeeding.
(I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual approach we're taking until we launch the product/service.)
Of course lean has worked well. Especially when it was the hungry rat or roach to the 90s dinosaur. But people are getting complacent in this success, and increasingly chicken-shit to do something really difficult and time-consuming.
And there are a lot of skittish roaches and rats running around the tech scene now. The startups types just out of college saw Social Network and they think its easy, ha ha. Time for a new kind of beast to rise, a bigger one that does not suffer from startup-ADD and requires a lot more intellectual and financial resources to grow.
I've been working on some hellish shit, pushing myself to the very limit of what I can do after 15 years of programming. A lot of people won't touch difficult now. But difficult or not-on-trend or unseen advantage is what good investing is all about.
It seemed risky to people with self-programmed assumptions to do lean in the early-to-mid-naughts. It seems risky to do a big beast now. But investing is finding some edge, that is one great way to increase your chances to win.