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The normal usage of the term "Lean" (ie from Toyota) actually has little to do with validated learning and more to do with the elimination of wasteful aspects o

by Ramone 14y ago

The normal usage of the term "Lean" (ie from Toyota) actually has little to do with validated learning and more to do with the elimination of wasteful aspects of production that don't directly lead to customer value. Usually that means "pulling" work out of a team based on need rather than trying to anticipate need that might never materialize (like the need to scale workforce and infrastructure, which is the case here). FTA: "The idea, he says, is to be “global from day one and have scalability built in.”". Of course in any pull system, validated learning is built-in, because new customer demand is new information, but the focus of Lean is actually the reduction of wasteful production. He'll have wasted a lot of time/money if demand doesn't match the infrastructure he's built.

rcavezza 14y ago
In this context, its about eliminating waste through validated learning.
krschultz 14y ago
You are spot on. Unfortunately the 'Lean Startup' book basically overloaded a lot of words around Lean. I love the concept in the 'Lean Startup' book, I also love Lean methodology in manufacturing. But it is confusing as hell to talk to people in both fields becuase a lot of words have different meanings now.
- coachwei 14y ago
  Hi Guys - I'm the Yottaa guy. Agree with lots of things said here. However, each company operates within its own context and the popular way may not be the appropriate way for a particular company. For Yottaa, from our background and industry experience (In my previous life, I started and grew an enterprise software company to profitability. I have also been involved with quite a few startups from initial formation to successful exits), we knew there is a $billion market for what we do because it is a proven market (It really doesn't take a genius to know there is a big market for web performance, monitoring and security). We also knew that we can execute on the ideas (normally it would take some real work to convince others about one's execution capability. Fortunately in our case, our decisions don't require us convincing other people to make). So we can skip the some of the initial "validated learning" process (not entirely, but a part of it). It is risky to skip some of it - however, that is the risk we decided to take anyway. More importantly, as I learned from personal experiences, the biggest startup challenge is growth. The major hurdle to success is not financing, getting the first 10 customers, getting to the first million dollar revenue or even the first $5M revenue - we have done these before and lots of people have done these before. However, it is exponentially challenging to grow from $10M to $100M in revenue. Out of 1000 startups, there may be 100 get funded and 50 actually get to a million dollar in revenue, but there are probably only 5 get to $50M revenue. Another important aspect to take into consideration is the kind of product that we are building at Yottaa. As highly distributed software service that optimizes and processes Internet traffic in real time, it takes more than five smart engineers to reach the basic level of performance, reliability and scalability. There are quite a few other reasons that drove this decision that I won’t bore you folks further. In the end, we decided to take the approach we took. After a lot of real hard work and experiments, we have figured out the right process, people and methodology to be extremely effective and scalable. We have been able to roll out a major product every 3 months: Late 2011: Site Optimizer Jan 2012: Web Performance API Feb 2012: Yottaa CDN May 2012: Yottaa Mobile Acceleration Service (lots more coming soon). The pace of development and efficiency is fairly rapid. In 6 months, our Optimizer has grown to from 0 to over 100M unique visitors per month. So we are definitely seeing the benefits of our model now. How successful can this model be? Time will tell.

by Ramone 14y ago

rcavezza 14y ago

In this context, its about eliminating waste through validated learning.

krschultz 14y ago

You are spot on. Unfortunately the 'Lean Startup' book basically overloaded a lot of words around Lean. I love the concept in the 'Lean Startup' book, I also love Lean methodology in manufacturing. But it is confusing as hell to talk to people in both fields becuase a lot of words have different meanings now.

coachwei 14y ago
Hi Guys - I'm the Yottaa guy. Agree with lots of things said here. However, each company operates within its own context and the popular way may not be the appropriate way for a particular company. For Yottaa, from our background and industry experience (In my previous life, I started and grew an enterprise software company to profitability. I have also been involved with quite a few startups from initial formation to successful exits), we knew there is a $billion market for what we do because it is a proven market (It really doesn't take a genius to know there is a big market for web performance, monitoring and security). We also knew that we can execute on the ideas (normally it would take some real work to convince others about one's execution capability. Fortunately in our case, our decisions don't require us convincing other people to make). So we can skip the some of the initial "validated learning" process (not entirely, but a part of it). It is risky to skip some of it - however, that is the risk we decided to take anyway. More importantly, as I learned from personal experiences, the biggest startup challenge is growth. The major hurdle to success is not financing, getting the first 10 customers, getting to the first million dollar revenue or even the first $5M revenue - we have done these before and lots of people have done these before. However, it is exponentially challenging to grow from $10M to $100M in revenue. Out of 1000 startups, there may be 100 get funded and 50 actually get to a million dollar in revenue, but there are probably only 5 get to $50M revenue. Another important aspect to take into consideration is the kind of product that we are building at Yottaa. As highly distributed software service that optimizes and processes Internet traffic in real time, it takes more than five smart engineers to reach the basic level of performance, reliability and scalability. There are quite a few other reasons that drove this decision that I won’t bore you folks further. In the end, we decided to take the approach we took. After a lot of real hard work and experiments, we have figured out the right process, people and methodology to be extremely effective and scalable. We have been able to roll out a major product every 3 months: Late 2011: Site Optimizer Jan 2012: Web Performance API Feb 2012: Yottaa CDN May 2012: Yottaa Mobile Acceleration Service (lots more coming soon). The pace of development and efficiency is fairly rapid. In 6 months, our Optimizer has grown to from 0 to over 100M unique visitors per month. So we are definitely seeing the benefits of our model now. How successful can this model be? Time will tell.