Building a viable product is of course something you need to do as a company to succeed. Building a minimum viable product on the other hand might just trap you

Building a viable product is of course something you need to do as a company to succeed. Building a minimum viable product on the other hand might just trap you into building a product quickly that isn't viable because you end up throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The problem is with the word minimum. How much of your product can you strip away without losing the value proposition? If you strip away too much, it won't be viable. This is where startup methodology of building something quickly and then failing is at odds with the traditional way of doing something well and then growing a business around that. It's a slower process but occasionally such companies become big. Investors are obsessed with taking short cuts to success. So they'll favor companies that build an MVP. Most of those will fail but occasionally they get lucky and the failures are relatively quick and painless (think acquihires). An MVP is easier if you eliminate all risk. Like the outcomes of potentially risky R&D or actually doing anything complicated and risky. Of course the intersection of low risk stuff and actually valuable stuff is pretty narrow. So investors love things like uber, air bnb, because all these things are are simple variations of market places and easy to understand. They are no-tech companies and their MVP is a simple website. All they needed early on is marketing, business development, some generic full stack coders and lots of cash to fake it until they make it. MVP thinking breeds generic no-tech startups. Some of these end up being valuable but most of them don't really do anything that is technically interesting. Or valuable. Or viable. There's a different class of companies that follow a very different pattern. These are tech companies that start with some hard core R&D. They are risky investments with a non linear payoff (relative to the investment) in case things work out. SpaceX is a good example. They got close to failing after spending many billions. And then they made it to orbit and with a lot more investment they eventually got the company profitable. The MVP for a rocket company is a rocket that makes it to orbit. The MVP for a nuclear fusion plant is building a plant that produces power. That has not happened yet of course but people are spending billions trying to make that happen. That's a different type of investor that does that. Usually, these investors will base their decisions on very early proofs of concept, founder reputation, or other signals of things looking promising.