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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

The Lean Startup took off when it did because it represented a new way of building a business. Before the open source stack got deep enough and servers got cheap enough, there was no room for low-capital startups. Then we hit an inflection point where it became increasingly possible to bootstrap highly scalable businesses.

The Lean Startup is simply an old world entrepreneur discovering the possibilities in the new world. It's not that it's better, it's just been more fertile ground over the last several years. However, as more and more smart kids show up on the scene, I think the pendulum will swing back because the stuff that can be done without capital or investment is going to get tapped out by armies of ramen-eaters. There's always room for a great new idea, but if you have access to capital a little barrier to entry is not a bad thing.

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But the thing that caught on about the idea of a "lean startup" in the area I live in (Salt Laje City) wasn't so much the concept of "it takes less money to start a business now" as "your customers know what they want more than you do." Because of this, every investor instructs you to read a book called "Nail It Then Scale It," which is a dumbed down version of The Lean Startup, which is a dumbed down version of Four Steps to the Epiphany.

The process is explained like this. "You have an idea. But is it validated? Go ask a bunch of people if they think it's a good idea." People aren't encouraged to build a minimum viable product to iterate on first.

I see this as a huge step backward, removing the intuition of a founder and killing serious innovation. The thing is this model works great for some SaaS companies that try to figure out which software is needed in industry X then create it for them. But that path of entrepreneurship makes me cringe. That sounds like no fun at all. Will it be successful? Sure, a bunch of $1-50 million companies will come out of that, but just building stuff people tell you to? No thanks.

The truest entrepreneurship, or at least what I want to be involved in, is where you operate according to your own vision and intuition, and give people something they had never imagined. That's incredibly hard to do, but that's what's so exciting about building companies, at least to me.

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And capital need not necessarily be direct financial in vestment. For example any Web 2.0 ramen startup will have 15+ years of computer and software experience and education as its capital base. Throw in a hardware need, like making thermostats and the rarity of the education and thus capital Increases Last weeks demo day highlighted this for me - UAV hardware and software plays - that's gonna be a rare combo in any market, and guys trying to offer easy divorce web sites - the capital needed there is quite low

I think if we look at capital as previously invested education for skills needed, the fill in the gaps websites have no moats, the arduino is about to be the biggest barrier to entry for the Web 3.0

I also feel like The Lean Startup really isn't anything new. Its just articulated and repackaged in a different way that's more sexy, or tech-y.

God forbid any of my peers start reading Drucker...

I was actually reminded of Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline.

That's a good one too - luckily they had a second edition or it may have been totally lost in the endless abyss of time. I'd be really surprised to find someone of my generation to have read about it though...

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