Book · How companies get built
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries · 2011
The book that made "minimum viable product" a phrase every founder uses — worth reading mostly so you can tell who has understood it.
Why it is here
The argument is that a startup is an experiment in conditions of extreme uncertainty, and that the job is to test the riskiest assumption as cheaply as possible rather than to execute a plan. It has been enormously influential and is now so absorbed into startup vocabulary that people quote it without having read it.
That is precisely why it is useful to an angel. A founder describing an MVP that took eighteen months and full engineering resource has not understood the idea, and being able to tell is a genuine diligence signal.
The methodology is stronger on how to test than on what to test, and it is at its weakest in domains where a minimum product is not a coherent concept — regulated medicine, hardware, anything where the first version must be safe.
Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP
What a minimum viable product is actually supposed to be. Useful as a yardstick: a founder describing an eighteen-month MVP has not understood the idea, and that gap is a diligence signal.
Published by Y Combinator. Channel verified from ycombinator.com, and YouTube's own oEmbed response names that channel as this video's author. Pressing play loads content from YouTube.
Read it if
You want to be able to tell whether a founder actually operates the way they say they do.
Skip it if
You invest mainly in deep tech, hardware or regulated healthcare, where the framework applies badly.