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 everywh

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.