I read the book and found it quite enjoyable.
And with all due respect to Eric Ries and all of the VCs out there chasing lean startups, I recognized one simple truth. I still like my startups Phat.
A phat startup aims to solve a very big, very difficult problem that will transform an industry. They typically take many millions, or even tens of millions and 1-3 years to get the first product out the door. They are big ambitious bets on deep technology and market transitions that are difficult to predict. They require invention and problem solving and risk, yes risk. They are a venture in the true sense of the word.
But my goal is not to dismiss the good ideas in the Lean Startup bible. There are many, but some simply don’t apply.
For example, in Phat startups, the challenge is not whether customers will want it (or whether you need to pivot or iterate or some other euphemism). The challenge is whether it can be built in the first place—will it work at all? Will it perform to spec? Will it scale? Will it be reliable? Can it be manufactured? Will it hit the price point?
Very frequently, the last question is whether customers will buy it. I know this sounds “unconventional” and decidedly old-school, but in many of these cases, if you CAN build it, they WILL come.
Why? Because phat startups often address problems that simply can’t be solved any other way, and customers are in dire need of solutions—from cancer treatments to robots for bomb disposal to switches capable of handing exponential growth in mobile data.
And that’s why, once the product is proven, phat startups have been many of our region’s, and our country’s fastest growing and biggest winners. All of these were $1B market cap companies:
| Company | $ Raised to 1st Revenue* | Goal |
| Starent | $30M+ | Smartphones at 3G speeds |
| Athenahealth | $13M+ | Electronic medical records |
| Endeca | $30M+ | Enterprise search/analytics |
| A123 | $30M+ | Electric vehicles |
| Aveo Pharma | $100M+ | Cancer treatment |
| EqualLogic | $20M+ | Storage for virtual infrastructures |
| Netezza | $35M+ | Big data analytics |
| iRobot | $15M+ | Military robots |
| Acme Packet | $20M+ | SIP/VoIP enablement |
*These are my estimates based on VentureSource.
And there’s a new generation of New England companies following in their footsteps:
Demandware (on-demand e-commerce), QD Vision (display color enhancement), 24M (grid storage), 1366 (direct solar wafer), Plexxi (10 GB networks), Affirmed (4G Mobile), Actifio (secondary storage), Qualtre (smartphone components), Xtalic (electronic components), Akiban (scale out databases).
But a key question comes to mind: Are phat startups riskier than lean startups? It depends how you measure risk.
One of the great virtues of lean startups is that they
