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The point of lean startups isn't so that your startup finds the global maximum. Investors invest in many startups. Each one starts in a different valley and st
by jeffdavis 8y ago
The point of lean startups isn't so that your startup finds the global maximum.
Investors invest in many startups. Each one starts in a different valley and starts climbing the hill. The investor's job is that one of the startups pays off. Your job is to climb your hill quickly and cheaply.
- foobiekr 8y agoThis. If you think of startup investments as market probing activity, then the lean startup model is an optimized version of this for specific kinds of markets. You aren't going to make a new storage company or a new ASIC-based company in the lean startup model (though you can certainly be _lean_er_ than companies tended to be in the past or the lavishly spending mega-investment-level companies on the spendthrift side of the capital wall like Uber) but you can do a lot of probing of the consumer marketplace this way.
- Jakkaps 8y agoDepends on which way you look at. I wrote the article from the perspective of a founder, not an investor. The math analogy is a bit stretched though. Following it, the only thing that matters is where you start. If you started in the hill leading up to the global maximum you'd be good. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would suspect reaching a global maximum is more expensive than reaching a local one. Truly world-changing ideas, therefore, don't lend themselves as well to the lean methodology.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jeffdavis 8y agoI guess it's a matter of scale, like a fractal. If your idea is big enough, it might be easy to get fooled into thinking you are at the top when a small detour might lead to a much higher summit.