The Lean Startup methodology is likely applicable only within a very narrow niche: a newly discovered green field with plenty of low-hanging fruit. Web apps in the late 90s and 2000s. Mobile apps after that. Agent integrations now. These are areas where the barrier to entry is low, problems are plenty, and there's space for a thousand flowers to bloom.

In contrast, for a company that can't be started by a single app developer - getting out of the building won't help. Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.

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apsurd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is defeatist.

What do I know, I don't run a billion dollar startup. But there's a valuable "necessary but not sufficient" insight to all good advice. The lean startup IS good advice. The best I can do with your argument is "getting out of the building is no longer sufficient".

Sure. But it doesn't make the entire arch of how we got here "wrong". And yes, all companies were started with a few people, a few customers. So that's why there's nothing much here to see for me, other than defeatist sentiment.

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dminik 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It may be defeatist, but it is correct.

Seriously, how do you even realistically approach taking on ASML. They spent decades and billions of (investment) dollars to do insane moonshot research and it paid off. But it also closed off the door behind them.

Entire countries (Russia, China, ...) have been trying to reproduce it. They have not succeeded yet.

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aboardRat4 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>They have not succeeded yet.

Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

	▲	liotier 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!". ... An argument that may not convince China and Russia, who have a track record of ignoring it - I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.

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apsurd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

why does one need to take on ASML? I had to look it up, semiconductors.

ASML market cap is ~500B. Meta market cap is ~1.5T.

i'm no facebook fan but it was started by a dude in a dorm room.

So I think saying "well those times are gone now" is defeatist.

(fwiw i personally have no interest in building a trillion dollar company from my basement, just talking philosophy here)

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dminik 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If we're going to be like that, we should go for Nvidia. Their market cap is currently ~4T.

I can see that going very well.

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apsurd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm genuinely asking why are we goaling on overtaking the most valuable companies in human history?

Startup advice, as i understand it, is about innovation: expanding the pie. I sound like a VC shill. Don't mean to be, i know it's riddled with rich people passing money around pretending like value is being created.

It's just I don't get what's so wrong with the HN crowd here trying to be better at building a successful company?

	▲	aboardRat4 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>I'm genuinely asking why are we goaling on overtaking the most valuable companies in human history? The most valuable companies are expected to be the largest, and, as a result, the most inefficient hence the easiest to overtake.

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throwaway27448 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hey there's always communism to aim for when y'all fail to improve society

	▲	apsurd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It makes sense to me to try to be good at Capitalism. You're right, it may be a fool's errand, but what's the alternative? FWIW, can't believe I'm replying to literally "throwaway random number" but Capitalism isn't my cup of tea. I rode around on a bicycle for the last decade. But it's what we've got.

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loeber 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.

	▲	jakewins 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Fooled by Randomness talks a good bit about this, and argues it’s true - except you don’t know what to bet on. Hence the outlier successes will be from extreme risk takers, and for each such person there will be 1,000s of other gamblers that bet on the wrong thing. Taleb does the math as well IIRC, assuming there are x hundred thousand extreme risk takers, and outlier “correct bets” are y% chance, then you will have a surprisingly high number of people with a long series of “correct” bets behind them looking like business geniuses, from pure chance & basic statistics.
	▲	saghm 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In other words, lean startups a concept were itself a lean startup, where the strategy was good enough when the circumstances were fruitful but now is supplanted by other strategies that do it better. The turtles all the way down were leaning so far that they fell over.

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lumost 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It also forces you to focus on some extremely narrow problem definition. Often, these narrow problem definitions turn out to be features of existing platforms or in the ai age - artifacts of the current model generation.

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antonvs 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Nobody in the space worth talking to will talk to you, for starters.

There’s a skill issue there. I know a founder who’s able to get people to talk to him. As a result, his startup had F500 customers almost from the beginning.

But that’s the kind of thing that no amount of documented strategy and tactics is ever doing to be able to teach. I’ve watched it happening, but I can’t do it.