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Comment by temp8830 | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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

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.

It's not like the past generations didn't try to make it work, too, and for-profit development has failed to deliver the promise of technology that uplifts rather than oppresses by any metric i can think of. If capitalism doesn't work, and there are no alternatives, then perhaps we shouldn't be using chips at all and we should be focusing on other means to solve problems in our society.

Edit: wikipedia is nice. So are cheap universal personal cameras. Point to point communication is nice. None of these require capitalism at all; indeed, capital will want to rent out these as well (if you aren't already renting through a cell plan). why must our needs always be subservient to those of the market?

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.

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)

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.

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?

>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.

>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!".

> 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.

>I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.

It's not enough to reproduce just the work of asml, you basically have to reproduce their entire supply chain, because, same reason, their suppliers will have trouble obtaining export permissions.

> Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake

No its not, you have to be extremely precise when making the machine, and only ASML knows how to do that. China already have a big government funded project to reproduce ASML machines and they have failed so far.

Nonsense. Patents are a locked glass door; anyone can get in if they knock hard enough. And Chinese engineers wear heavy gloves and eye protection when going door-to-door.

I used to work for ASML as a design engineer, and I asked my manager why we didn't shred our paperwork, like some other companies I worked at.

"With all the trouble we've had, getting our designs to work? We should publish them to slow down our competitors!"

He wasn't wrong. “Nothing that's good works by itself, you've got to make the damn thing work.” — Thomas A. Edison.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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