By now, everyone is aware that cloud computing (among other recent developments) has drastically reduced the cost of starting a new business, both in time and money. What's not so well known is that this has changed not only how cheaply and quickly businesses can be started, but also
how they're started. Rather than draw up an executive summary and business plan, talk to advisors and research the market, it seems like nowadays folks just say "fuck it" and put their foot on the accelerator from day one.
Even those who form a team and raise money are doing this. It's not just the bootstrappers. For instance, I can name 3-4 people in my admittedly tiny sphere who had an idea, raised significant amounts of money, built a product, promptly failed, then pivoted multiple times before running out of cash.
It's as if starting a business has become so easy, that it's easier to just do it and see what happens rather than invest any kind of time and effort in researching the market first. This shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude is spurred along by stories of huge multi-billion-dollar companies being born out of half-assed "so what now?" pivots. (See Twitter.)
In my experience, it's ok to do this once or twice because in your first at-bat, you don't know what you're doing anyway, so stopping to assess a market is just a waste of time. Put a year or two into something, get a feel for how it's done, and if you don't turn into Mark Zuckerberg (home run on first shot), you'll be better prepared to assess the validity of future projects. (That said, the best of my 4 businesses was the first, so there are exceptions.)
While I admire his entrepreneurial spirit, the author of this article (and his partners?) seem to have taken the "shoot first" philosophy a bit too far. 10 startups in 7 years seems extreme to me. The optics of it, from a potential investor's perspective, seem negative, too.