Wed 16 December 2015 by Christoph Witzany
TL;DR
This is a long blog post, longer and heavier than the average Captain's Log. So if you're not into philosophical treatises, here is the gist:
- The Lean Start-Up movement is great
- The methodology has to be taken with a grain of salt
- CloudFleet is not a lean start-up
- We at CloudFleet believe that tools to achieve Data Autonomy are too important to pivot from
- Most transformative start-ups were only successful because the founders possessed a certain amount of stubbornness
Eric Ries' Dream
When Eric Ries introduced the methodology of the lean start-up, he dreamed of a systematic way that would allow start-up founders to succeed.
He assumed that the product-market fit is a necessary and almost sufficient condition for the success of a start-up. Therefore, the main goal of the lean startup method is to attain that.
He challenges start-up founders to get out of the building to talk to people about their needs and to validate the assumption about the customers who lie at the core of the intended business model. Create theories, identify the theory with the biggest uncertainty, test it. If it proves wrong, change your business model, and repeat the process.
Whoever is reminded of a scientific experiment might be mistaken. Indeed it closely mirrors the platonic ideal of scientific progress as laid out by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
According to Ries, "Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught".
Karl Popper's Dream
In his seminal writings about the scientific method, Karl Popper tried to reconcile the practice of science with its logic foundations. Since Aristotle, two warring schools of thought had dominated the sciences.
According to the idealistic school, the insight about nature comes from the depth of our minds. Based on a few simple principles, you would be able to deduce truths about the world. This is how Aristotle built his physics.
For almost two millenia it was not only the dominant method in science; the principles laid down in his writings also went largely unchallenged.
It took strong-minded individuals like Galileo and Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and Kepler, who - some at considerable personal expense - started deducing the laws of the world from systematic and thorough observations to rattle the cage of Aristotelian science that had constricted.
One of the most fascinating works that show this method is Kepler's groundbreaking work Astronomia Nova. Almost every chapter starts with the proclamation of how stupid he was upon writing the preceding chapter. Of course, it had nothing to do with him being stupid and all with the continuing refinement of his theories in his quest to attain a theory-reality-fit.
Based on this new approach Hume and Locke developed the empirical method. According to them, all insight into the world stems from careful observation — which by induction lead to theories about the world.
This concept, however, suffered from one fatal flaw. There is no logical connection between the past and the future. The fact that the bus came around the corner each day from Monday to Friday does not mean that it will be on the same schedule on Saturday or Sunday.
Karl Popper proposed a solution. To predict the future, you have to create a model that explains your past observations and makes predictions about the future. Then you can "get out of the building" and test your assumptions, just like you would do it for your start-up according to the lean start-up method.
Theory And Practice ...
Reality, however, is quite a bit messier than the nice white paper philosophical concepts and theories are written upon. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn analyzed how new ideas were introduced into and adopted by the scientific community. In his research he found that few scientists were ready to change their opinions when a new paradigm came around. Not the least because most new paradigms initially have a worse reality theory fit than the established ones, which had been refined and polished for decades.
Only when the champions of the old paradigm would start to retire from the community and finally die out, the new paradigm - now also refined and polished - would prevail. Popper's followers, like Imre Lakatos, also acknowledged the fact that scientific progress usually did not follow the platonic ideal of Popper's method and in Against Method, Paul Feyerabend delivered a scathing critique of it.
Despite this criticism, the basic idea that a scientific theory should make testable predictions is still the universally-accepted, gold standard for science.
... in the Start-Up World
People that found Start-Ups are usually passionate about their idea. It doesn't work if they are not. The brain has to justify working countless hours on a project with a high probability of failure, eschewing the amenities and material benefits of a steady job in an established company most people working on a start-up would have no difficulty to get.
If you are very passionate about your idea, it is difficult to let it go. Focusing on hunting the elusive product market fit by means of iterate and pivot can also be a distraction from delivering a product that really makes a difference.
Google wasn't built after a carefully-tuned process to attain a market fit. Neither were Apple, AirBnB or Dropbox. Needless to say, talking to your prospective customers is of uttermost importance. You have to identify what their pain is and think hard about how you can solve that. But do not forget Henry Ford's wisdom when he said "If I had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses". Transformative, disruptive ideas are not born in an iterative process, they are forged in the fires of passion.
The Mission of CloudFleet
CloudFleet is such an idea. We are not interested in changing a corner of the world. We will change how people think about their data and the algorithms that control them.
Of course, listening to users and making sure our user experience is great is of uttermost important to us. But the core axiom — that the world needs an easy-to-use, distributed system where the data is under control of the people.. That axiom is not negotiable.
Join us on this journey and be part of the next revolution in computing!