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Oh, goddammit: Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups: http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-startups-aren’t-cheap-startups/ http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-

Oh, goddammit: Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups: http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-startups-aren’t-cheap-startups/ http://steveblank.com/2009/11/02/lean-startups-aren’t-cheap-... Horowitz agrees with sgblank and ries!

staunch 17y ago
Are you sure he does? There's plenty of overlap, so it's easy to see the similarities, but he's talking about spending tens of millions per month investing in software development. Having 100 people when you could get by with much less. Outspending the competition. That sounds different to me.
- swombat 17y ago
  It's not. Ries and Blank argue for focusing your money expenditure on validated learning about your customers. They don't argue for whether you should spend more or less. You could have a lean start-up that burns $10m a month.
  - staunch 17y ago
    Well they're making up a new definition of lean if having 100 people when you could easily get by with 40 counts as lean.
    - swombat 17y ago
      The point of a start-up isn't to "get by", it's to discover, prove, and then scale up a new business model. "Getting by" is pointless if you haven't found your product/market fit. You need to invest in finding it until it's found. If that takes 100 people, then that's how many people you should hire (if you can afford it).
      - staunch 17y ago
        That's just dodging the very real decision he had to make. He could continue searching for product/market fit with 40 people or he could do it with 100. There's no "right" answer, they're just different approaches. Many people would (and did) advocate taking the leaner approach, but he took the fatter one...
coffeemug 17y ago
Sure, but if you look at the startup environment today, most people (VCs, founders, bloggers, etc.) mean "cheap" when they say "lean". You read about it everywhere - how startups are getting cheaper, how you could build one on a shoestring budget, how the traditional VC model is dying, etc. Of course when someone says startups are getting cheaper, one has to ask "cheaper than what?" Cheaper than during the dot com boom, sure, because people don't get fresh ice sculptures delivered to their office every morning anymore. But that's nothing new, we knew that for a while, so comparing today's startups to those of the dot com boom isn't very useful. A much more useful statement would be that startups today are cheaper than they were two years ago, but in my experience this just isn't true. The biggest expense of modern startups is paying the employees, and the salaries of great people (engineers and otherwise) are rising, so I'd argue that startups are getting more expensive relative to their cost a few years ago. Most (but not all, of course) things that have huge value take a few years to build and a lot of careful work to market, which means that underfunding most startups is a terrible idea. This article does an excellent job pointing it out.

staunch 17y ago

Are you sure he does? There's plenty of overlap, so it's easy to see the similarities, but he's talking about spending tens of millions per month investing in software development. Having 100 people when you could get by with much less. Outspending the competition. That sounds different to me.

swombat 17y ago
It's not. Ries and Blank argue for focusing your money expenditure on validated learning about your customers. They don't argue for whether you should spend more or less. You could have a lean start-up that burns $10m a month.
- staunch 17y ago
  Well they're making up a new definition of lean if having 100 people when you could easily get by with 40 counts as lean.
  - swombat 17y ago
    The point of a start-up isn't to "get by", it's to discover, prove, and then scale up a new business model. "Getting by" is pointless if you haven't found your product/market fit. You need to invest in finding it until it's found. If that takes 100 people, then that's how many people you should hire (if you can afford it).
    - staunch 17y ago
      That's just dodging the very real decision he had to make. He could continue searching for product/market fit with 40 people or he could do it with 100. There's no "right" answer, they're just different approaches. Many people would (and did) advocate taking the leaner approach, but he took the fatter one...

coffeemug 17y ago

Sure, but if you look at the startup environment today, most people (VCs, founders, bloggers, etc.) mean "cheap" when they say "lean". You read about it everywhere - how startups are getting cheaper, how you could build one on a shoestring budget, how the traditional VC model is dying, etc. Of course when someone says startups are getting cheaper, one has to ask "cheaper than what?" Cheaper than during the dot com boom, sure, because people don't get fresh ice sculptures delivered to their office every morning anymore. But that's nothing new, we knew that for a while, so comparing today's startups to those of the dot com boom isn't very useful. A much more useful statement would be that startups today are cheaper than they were two years ago, but in my experience this just isn't true. The biggest expense of modern startups is paying the employees, and the salaries of great people (engineers and otherwise) are rising, so I'd argue that startups are getting more expensive relative to their cost a few years ago. Most (but not all, of course) things that have huge value take a few years to build and a lot of careful work to market, which means that underfunding most startups is a terrible idea. This article does an excellent job pointing it out.