Lean Startup: The Missing Chapter

I recently finished The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is a seminal business book. The Lean Startup takes its name from the lean manufacturing techniques made famous by Toyota Motor Corporation. It applies some of the principles and techniques learned from lean manufacturing and applies them to the startup world. You’ve probably heard some of these terms before:

pivoting

continuous deployment

running lean

These terms have caught hold of the startup world and seeped into the lingua franca of entrepreneurs. What you might not have heard of are these terms:

leap of faith assumption

innovation accounting

engines of growth

Ries, coins more terms than a loose slot machine. Behind each term however, are powerful concepts, that if harnessed can really revolutionize the “business” of startups. Underlying the framework that The Lean Startup outlines, is the underlying idea that startups can be built on top of rigorous, scientific methodology. It demystifies the success of startups into an actionable process, helping startups to ask the right questions and track the right evidence.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. - W. Edwards Deming

I highly recommend everyone to read this book. Not just people who are part of the cult of startups, but everyone in the country. It’s that big. The concepts in this book could be an engine of growth for our economy as a whole, not just for helping a handful of startups.

That’s why I titled this post: The Missing Chapter. Before we can begin to apply the principles of The Lean Startup, we have to begin. And that’s the hardest part. What’s missing is the steps we need to even get started.

Dante Alighieri, of Inferno fame, once said: “The secret of getting things done is to act!” On the surface, this seems flippant and obvious, but dig deeper and it points out a fundamental problem - it is very hard to get started. Seth Godin calls this “the lizard brain” talking. It’s that part of our brain that is fearful of new things; it kicks in to try to paralyze us into inaction.

The mythology around startups hasn’t helped things in this regard. When we see movies like The Social Network, we hear about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, and we build up this idea of entrepreneurs as passionate gamblers. These people are a class of citizens who are willing to risk everything for that huge idea. They gamble down to their last penny, leave promising careers, work ungodly hours. They appear to be - with apologies to Nietzsche - supermen among men.

This myth of entrepreneurs hurts us in many ways but the worst way is it makes startups unobtainable to the vast majority of people. People are generally risk-averse, they would rather have the certain instead of the uncertain - it’s simple empirical psychology.

There is a movement to demystify startups. In their also excellent book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, of 37signals, write about throwing out the term “entrepreneur” entirely. “Don’t call them entrepreneurs, call them starters."

Let’s take this idea of democratizing startups and meld it with the framework that The Lean Startup proposes. Let’s get the word out that you don’t need to be a passionate gambler to be an entrepreneur. The first chapter is to start. Start small. Start with lower risk. Start with lower uncertainty. We’re already seeing this in action with the great work Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures and Brad Feld at TechStars have been doing demystifying the world of Venture Capital. Let’s take it further. Let’s help everyone get started running lean.