It's not startups vs big corporations. It's about the constraints on your ability to iterate. You can't iterate on hardware the same way you do on software. If

It's not startups vs big corporations. It's about the constraints on your ability to iterate. You can't iterate on hardware the same way you do on software. If you're used to building the minimum possible thing that will work, shipping that, then gradually improving it day by day you are in for a rude awakening in the hardware business. You can't improve the hardware after it is out of your hands. All you can do is release a second piece of hardware that incorporates improvements. But you must charge all your customers over again, and not all of them will upgrade, and the whole process takes a lot of time and has a lot of friction. You also can't iterate on a public API the way you do on an app. Once other folks have dependencies pointing to your API the cat is out of the bag. It is several orders of magnitude harder to deprecate an API than to release it. This is why, while iterating on software is good in general, you really don't have the option to reinvent your platform's basic copy-and-paste API too many times. It really pays to iterate internally until you get that right.