Response To Steve Blank’s Article “Is The Lean Startup Dead?”

Bouiti-Viaudo Boris
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

I just finished reading Steve Blank’s Medium article “Is the Lean Startup dead?”. I would like to address some of the points he made in the article. I am writing this from the perspective of a business consultant who has applied the principles of Lean startup. I am writing this from the lens of someone who has profound respect for the work that Steve Blank and his colleagues have done to codify entrepreneurship. I am also writing this from the lens of someone who thinks that Eric Ries has created with Lean Startup one of the most important methodology of the last decade.

Nonetheless, I am 100% sure that you did not come here to read a “PC” preamble, so let’s get to the meat.

Steve Blank starts his article by mentioning Jeff Katzenberg, chairman of NewTV. Apparently, he has been able to raise close to 2 billion dollars based on the hypothesis that consumers will want to watch short-form mobile entertainment. According to Steve Blank, it’s “the antithesis of the Lean Startup” because he is building a platform without testing his hypotheses, which means that he is taking a lot of risks.

First of all, startups are risky by nature. I like Eric Ries’ definition: “a startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” The whole point of Lean Startup is to reduce uncertainty to the minimum. In the case of NewTV, Steve Blank infers that Jeff Katzenberg raised money without having an MVP (minimum viable product). I disagree with that.

The Lean Startup principles never said that the MVP had to be your own. I would argue that smart entrepreneurs should instead leverage (when it applies) the billions of dollars spent in R&D by other companies as a learning experiment. If the focal point for NewTV is to find if consumers will embrace short-form mobile entertainment, they can borrow the results of other platforms that are already doing it to make it their MVP: Facebook watch, IGTV (Instagram), YouTube, Snapchat and Periscope (Twitter) spent billions on mobile entertainment. Don’t you think that we have enough data with these platforms to forecast if a Netflix for mobile would work?

Let’s look at the numbers for Facebook Watch:

Average views for the last 5 episodes of Humankind Stories on Facebook Watch: 2.2M views

Average views for the last 5 episodes of Ball in the Family on Facebook Watch: 917K views

Average views for the last 5 episodes of Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch on Facebook Watch: 66K views

It looks like a pretty good case study to me that short-form video for mobile works.

Okay, you can argue that NewTV started raising money before Facebook Watch and IGTV were introduced, which is a fair argument. My answer to that is that there were other case studies out there to serve as an MVP for NewTV: YouTube, Vines, Periscope and Meerkat to name a few.

Another critical question would be to know if mobile is the right platform for their product. If we apply the Lean Startup principles, we have to test this hypothesis. Is the trend toward doing more stuff or less stuff with our phone? Here again, data is available to answer that question. Steve Blank did a good job reminding us that Jeff Katzenberg is no dummy, so I am surprised that he thinks that he is raising money without testing his hypotheses. I repeat, data is available at a simple Google search…

Next, let’s analyze another point made by Steve Blank about Lean Startup:

“In short, Lean was an answer to a specific startup problem at a specific time, one that most entrepreneurs still face and which ebbs and flows depending on capital markets. It’s a response to scarce capital, and when that constraint is loosened, it’s worth considering whether other approaches are superior.”

I disagree with that statement. The Lean Startup methodology has been developed to stand the test of time. It’s a scientific methodology invented to minimize risk and waste of resources. In fact, I don’t even have to debate that Lean Startup is still relevant because Steve Blank said it himself in the conclusion. You can’t have it both ways though. You can’t say Lean Startup was relevant in a period of scarce capital and say few lines later that if you don’t have the resume of Jeff Katzenberg it applies to you. If I understand correctly, Steve Blank’s article is for 1% of entrepreneurs: if you’re not a genius like Elon Musk or a former Fortune 500 executive forget it.

Is it okay to ask if a methodology is dead when the alternative applies to only 1%?

I am surprised by the sensational headline, but it did get clicks, so mission accomplished?

The Lean startup methodology is well alive, and it will be useful for decades for companies of any size. Mr Blank, in your next article, I hope you won’t forget 99% of entrepreneurs.

Respectfully,

A regular dude.

This article was originally published in Golden Business Solution’s blog.

Boris Bouiti is the founder and CEO of Golden Business Solutions, a management consulting firm based in Fort Worth, Texas. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Bouiti-Viaudo Boris

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Investment Analyst| Write on Business & Finance

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