I agree, like the commenters, that lean vs. raising money is a false dichotomy. However, there are some valid points in this post: - You have to be careful wi

I agree, like the commenters, that lean vs. raising money is a false dichotomy. However, there are some valid points in this post: - You have to be careful with product quality. In a lean startup, because you prioritize market discovery over all else, you build a culture of people used to saying "Oh, that bug only affects 1% of customers, so we can ignore it.", even after you have found your market. - It's hard to give up steady growth to make the kind of long-investments you know you'll have to do. IMVU had a culture of running quick A/B experiments and throwing away the loser without any deep analysis. We had gotten stuck in a local maxima with stalled business growth, and it took replacement of most of the management team to fund a six-month project to rebuild our client UI from scratch. In our case, this was absolutely the right decision. Funding anything for six months straight would have been impossible with our previous "lean startup" culture. I, too, would like to see more discussion of lean startup edge cases. There is definitely a point where you transition out of the lean startup approach and into full-scale production. I suspect it's very similar to the game industry's preproduction vs. production distinction: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3847/beyond_scrum_lean_and_kanban_for_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3847/beyond_scrum_lean...