The Lean VC

Today, nothing is hotter than a “Lean Startup”. The general concept goes something like this:

The runway of a startup is not defined by a period of time, but by a number of pivots. To be successful, the startup should therefore, aggressively pursue pivot opportunities through early commercial exposure through “minimum viable products” (the clougiest thing that the startup can get anybody to actually buy). In other words, guessing what technology is going to work in the market is hard, so it is better to setup your company so you can aggressively test your ideas. 

At Rebound we have tried (as difficult as it is in Cleantech) to adopt this strategy in each of our technologies. Still, we get a LOT of pressure to do things "leaner" and I think that we are reaching the point where, at the very least, every entrepreneur on the planet has at least heard of the "lean" concept. The next step is obvious, and will likely be significantly more difficult: create a lean VC process to accompany the lean startup. So, what would that look like? Lets figure it out!

Optimally Naive

It's never feels good to be called Naive. But when it comes to startups, I want to propose the idea of Optimal Naiveté. This idea has been cooking around in my head for a few months on two levels.

First, I think any person doing something that is actually disruptive has to be incredibly Naive about how easy it will be. I know this is true about myself. Even today, after spending 2 years running full speed into walls, I still feel like, if I just sprint a bit faster, I could really change the world. Every day it occurs to me how stupid this is, but I just can't shake the Naiveté. But this is just the obvious "startups are hard" kind of statement that everybody says. I don't think this Naiveté actually helps Rebound be more successful outside the fact that, if I was more down to earth, I would have just gotten another job after the first wall / Russell interaction.

The more important  way that Naiveté effect success is on the technical / idea level. I think for any industry, if you had an impossible amount of data, you could construct a plot that looked like this:

success or not, hard to tell...

Several months ago, I purposefully stopped writing in this blog due to my own frustrations with the difficulty of getting Rebound funded. This frustration stemmed from several consecutive failures in a period already filled with other, more personal and impacting failures. In the end I stopped writing in the middle of several posts (which now I will try to finish) because I no longer cared to try to improve such a terribly impossible system.

That feeling has now ebbed a bit. And as it passed, I wanted to capture one side of it: the realization that, due to our own human limits, it is hard to even imagine what success looks like.  

A great analogy for this observation is the way we think about evolution in nature. For even the minority (pathetic right) of Americans who understand evolution to be the way all current living things have come to be, we tend to think about it in terms that we can understand: “survival of the fittest”.