This is something I've been thinking about for awhile now that I'm pursuing my own startup. Coming from a background in HPC, my papers were published using prototypes and proof-of-concepts. On the other hand, a product needs to work at all times. Hence, the idea of an MVP from a systems standpoint is rather fanciful -- if an MVP works for 1TB of data (or worse, 5TB of data), but doesn't work for 10TB or 100TB, then re-normalizing after the fact is a huge issue.

As a question to other startups based on novel systems, did you feel that an MVP was the right way to go? If not, what did you do differently so as to not labor in "almost, but not quite ready" limbo.