People balk at Lean Startup because it tends to come off as patronizing, reductionist, and antithetical to innovation. The stereotypical "lean" startup is so te

People balk at Lean Startup because it tends to come off as patronizing, reductionist, and antithetical to innovation. The stereotypical "lean" startup is so tethered to short-term customer feedback that it will produce, at best, an incrementally improved version of whatever product customers were already using. In other words, aiming for what customers will want a 2 months from now, as opposed to 2 years from now. To some extent I think this criticism is justified, but it's important to remember that even if big bets and profound insights into what customers want turn out to be correct, "non-lean" startups still need to be agile enough to adjust what they're doing on the margins through fast experiments. Getting 95% of the way towards having a product someone will pay for just is not good enough. To use Color Labs as an example, it can also be argued that Color was REALLY close to being successful, they just messed up distribution, and that had they used a small-scale, more iterative roll-out approach things would have been different.