This. 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

This. 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.