Monthly Archives: October 2012

When Apple was still Apple Computer

After reading The Apple Revolution, I discovered Return to the Little Kingdom, subtitled How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. It’s not just another book about Apple for 2 reasons: it was written in 1984 so when Apple, Inc was still Apple Computer, Inc and it was written by Michael Moritz, then a journalist at Time Magazine, but today one of the most famous venture capitalists, with investments in Yahoo and Google, just to mention two, although I must add that he has “a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable” and a result, he stepped back as managing director of Sequoia Capital.

It’s not that it adds a lot to the Apple Revolution, so no need to read both. Now, there are (very) interesting lessons, the best for me was probably in the Epilogue: “In 1984, faced with the challenge of managing a fast growing company in an increasingly competitive business, the board of directors were faced with the most important task that confronts any board: selecting a person to run the company. […] Only in retrospect have I come to understand the immense risk associated with hiring an outsider. […] It is not an accident that most of the great companies of yesterday and today have, during their heydays, been run or controlled by the people who gave them life. […] The founder, acting with an owner’s instincts, will have the confidence, authority and skills to lead. […] Experience is of little use in a young, fast-growing company in a new business that has a different pulse and unfamiliar rhythm. Experience is the safe choice, but often the wrong one.”

Now I could also refine my Apple cap. table as Moritz gave some nice details about employee shares. I also went back to the Apple S-1 document and slightly changed the content.

Here are the things I learnt: Both Jobs and Wozniak initally had 8’320’000 shares which they paid $2’654.48 so a price per share of $0.00032 in March 1977. Then Markkula bought the same 8’320’000 shares but for an amount of $91’000 so a price per share of $0.01094 in November 1977. The three of them were called the Promoters of the company. Then shares were sold to employees 1’280’000 to Michael Scott at a price per share of $0.01 in November 1977 and again 1’920’000 at $0.09 in August 1978. 800’000 to Frederick Holt at $0.01 in November 1977 and again 960’000 at $0.09 in August 1978. Same with Gene Carter, 160’000 to Gene Carter at $0.09 in June 1978 and 160’000 to at $0.09 in January 1979.

It should be noticed that employees were ranked as

#1 Stephen Wozniak
#2 Steven Jobs
#3 Mike Markkula
#4 Bill Fernandez had no share
#5 Frederick Holt
#6 Randy Wiggington (no info on his shares)
#7 Mike Scott – CEO
#8 Chris Espinosa had no share
#9 Sherry Livingston, first assistant, had shares
#10 Gary Martin – Accounting
#11 Don Bruener had no share
#12 Dan Kottke had no share
#13 John Draper
#14 Mike Wagner
#15 Donna Whitner
#16 Wendell Sander
Unknown Gene Carter had 320’000 shares
Unknown Jim Martindale
#34 Elmer Baum had no share

Jobs was so competitive, he did not like to be #2, so he asked to be #0! Buit Scott refused. Scott gave himself his number as a reference to 007!

Wozniak sold some stock to Fayez Sorfim, Richard Kramlich and Ann Bowers (Noyce’s wife). In the summer of 1979, Apple sold a total of $7M if existing shares are counted. Markkula and Jobs sold about $1M each. The “Wozplan” enabled some people including employees who had no shares so buy some of his.

Two EPFL Start-ups Take Off in Tandem with a corporate investor

Here’s my 6th contribution to EPFL‘sstart-up of the month

29.10.12 – Industrial or financial? For a start-up, the choice of an investor is crucial. Pix4D and senseFly, young offshoots of EPFL, provide a recent example of this dilemma.

We turn our attention to EPFL start-ups following two general stories in the entrepreneurial world. This month it is a question of not one but two young offshoots. Sensefly and Pix4D made headlines at EPFL this summer. It is indeed rare that an investor announces in one day the investment of capital in two of our start-ups. What’s more, the growing number of corporate investors in relation to venture capital investors represents an interesting trend.

Drones and 3D Images
SenseFly came out of the laboratory of Dario Floreano. You may have noticed these small airplanes crossing the skies over EPFL, as well as the start-up founders who pilot them remotely. A few years ago, I was impressed by these strange flying machines that automatically avoid obstacles. Pix4D is a spin-off from the laboratory of Pascal Fua, a specialist in image processing. They produce no equipment. Instead, they devised a method for constructing 3D images from disparate two-dimensional shots.

The investor is Parrot, which I had wrote about earlier this year: Parrot and Henri Seydoux, a French success. This French company of around 700 employees shows an annual revenue of around 250 million euros. Created in 1994, it went public in Paris in 2006. After its initial launch in voice recognition and hands-free kits for cars, its founder and CEO Henri Seydoux saw the need to diversify its activities. He bought a multitude of start-ups in fields connected to the heart of his business: wireless telecommunications, image processing, games, sensors. On their own, senseFly and Pix4D began collaborating at the beginning of this year, and Parrot found a synergy with both companies. Given that, the announcement of the simultaneous investments makes perfect sense.

The Tricky Choice of an Investor
I don’t know if the heads of Pix4D and Sensefly deliberately selected a manufacturing partner over a financial one. In any case, this decision is far from easy. All founders have to weigh the options when looking for an investor. A financier has only a return on the investment on the brain, and often over a short-term. A corporate investor thinks more strategically, but at the risk of being more selfish. In contrast to a financier, the corporate investor generally does not want to see partners working with the competition. The consequences of this choice, therefore, are critical to the development of the start-up.

The good news is that start-ups in recent years seem to receive more funding in their early stages, without having to wait for revenues and clients to prove their potential. It is even more exceptional that through collaborating, two EPFL start-ups improved their commercial potential.

Hopefully future entrepreneurs will be encouraged by this favorable environment. Let me conclude by quoting J.C. Zufferey, co-founder of senseFly: “We appreciated and benefitted from the support of PSE, FIT, Venture Kick, and CTI in this adventure. I think EPFL must not relent in its efforts to train, motivate, support, and coach young entrepreneurs. This is the price to gradually develop a culture of innovation in a country where people are naturally afraid of trying.”

French start-ups (again)

I am attached to France for obvious reasons. And recently, I have read a lot about French innovation. It’s not as bad as the general public may think but it is not as good as I would like. Still there are reasons for hope. Let me comment two recent works:
– an article from Le Monde newspaper, entitled Heureux comme un patron de start-up en France
– a report from OSEO (the French Innovation Agency) which I had mentioned before in You have to go global, and right from the start, but which I had read too quickly!

The article from Le Monde is about French Accelerator Le Camping. The article is optimistic (maybe a little too much), but you should read it if you understand French. What I noticed was:

– “The Hexagon can also count on experienced funds such as Partech (but also Idinvest, Apax) who continued to irrigate the area after the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000. About fifteen venture capital funds finance about a thousand start-ups and inject 200-300 million euros per year in the digital field, said Philippe Collombel. The French industry is one of the best in the world, judges Christopher Bavaria, president of Idinvest. And there are many areas where a little “Frenchy” managed to make a name alongside the leading Anglo-Saxon player: Dailymotion vs. YouTube, Viadeo behind LinkedIn , Deezer on the heels of Spotify …” I think this is dangerously optimistic but nice! We should not be just a copy-paste version of the USA though.

– “Another asset of the Hexagon: its serial entrepreneurs. The first generation began with the Minitel, has launched the digital era in the late 1990s, and overcame the bubble. They include Marc Simoncini (iFrance, Meetic), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (ventre-privée), Patrick Robin (Imaginet, 24h00), Xavier Niel … Twenty years later, they play the “business angels” for the younger: PriceMinister, Dailymotion, Criteo, or Deezer.” Quite true.

– However, “the Business Angels do not support enough entrepreneurs” […] “There are not enough funds enbling jumping from start-up to that of medium-sized companies.”

[You may also be interested about an analysis of the Acceletor trend from the Financial Times, which is also quite good: Start-ups put their foot on the accelerator. “In the past they could have been labelled an incubator, which is apparently different from an accelerator.” […] “Probably the first accelerator was Paul Graham’s Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. Since 2005 it has fostered almost 500 start-ups, including big successes such as AirBnB and Dropbox.” […] “This method of building new companies at warp speed is fascinating. The philosophy is to try lots of different ideas, fail fast, and pivot if something does not work. I like the sense of urgency, the work ethic, the high-pressure environment that helps drive rapid progress, and the incredible opportunities to network and cross-fertilise.” […] “However, in general, I think start-ups take a long time to become viable – years not months – so trying to achieve so much in such a concentrated period of time feels unrealistic.” […] “There are now an estimated 123 accelerator programmes around the world.” […] “Some veterans think many will close, just as many of the projects they incubate will fail. But all this frantic activity will surely boost entrepreneurship, stimulate jobs, and – in the long run – create wealth, so it deserves applause”]

You can find (in French) the OSEO report by clicking on the picture. I was wrong in my previous post, I learnt a few things! And it has more depth than the good Le Monde article. The first one is about the fears and difficulties of entrepreneurs.


Click on picture to enlarge.


Click on picture to enlarge.

Fear of failing with its attached stigma remains high. Finding customers is the biggest challenge, higher then finding investors. Interesting. Then there is an interesting lesson about the age of founders, which you can compare to an analysis I have made on 165 public companies.


Click on picture to enlarge. Source: personal data

This is a popular topic, and you might read again Wadhwa’s study, his Washington Post article or Is There A Peak Age for Entrepreneurship? I am not sure how to read all this, but I have the feeling there is a tendency to higher age recently… The average age of French founders is 41 whereas the public companies I have have founders with an average of 36.5 (and 34 for the companies founded before 1995).

Finally there is an analysis of “models of development of start-ups”.

The authors compare 2 main classes of start-ups (out of 5), the ones being the most common (classes 3 and 5 in the figure). [Class 4 is more an intermediate status en route to either 3 or 5; class 1 is M&A and class 5 have not developed at all.]

“In class 3, 41% of the total population, companies have a lower level of development because the company is “self-centered”. 50% have no partner, no subsidiary. The project leader is still a dominant position in the capital: 68% have a stake greater than 75% in this class; 1 out of 2 still 50% to 75% of capital.”

“In contrast, firms in class 5, have a proven open behavior. They have opened their capital to have the resources to advance an innovation project. 60% of project owners have less than 25% of the start-up in this class, as well as half of them with between 25% and 50% of the capital. Moreover, almost all listed companies are in this class. 80% of these companies are internationalized (export or implantation).”

“These are companies that have had time to grow: almost half who them are more than 8 years old and almost 40% are between 5 and 8 years old today. The maturity only does not explain, however, their momentum. Indeed, they were faced, too, with problems of redefining their business plans as well as those of class 3, even a little more frequently. However, they saw this less as a constraint.”

“In addition, Class 3 focuses more on public funding which is considered a main lever for growth. The youth of this population and the lower opening of their capital can hypothesize that the public support at the pre-seed and seed stages is an essential substitute to private capital.”

“The statistical comparison classes 3-5 on these variables reveals that:
• The median Class 5 has a higher workforce than class 4, which employs, more people than class 3 (respectively 10, 6 and 4 employees);
• Classes 4 and 5 achieve an identical median turnover (about 580k€) higher than the median Iclass 3 (390k€);
• On the median level of equity, it is still significantly higher for class 5 (409k€) than for class 4 (284k€) and Class 3 (149k€), and more than €1million for the upper quartile of the class 5 only 389k€ for the class 3)”

Of course the conclusion of the report is to encourage the filtering and then development towards class 5. but myless optimistic conclusion is that even class 5 companies are not big success stories…

The Case Against Patents

Thanks to colleagues in France with whom I exchange on the French innovation system, I was given the opportunity to know more about Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Their Case Against Patents (full pdf here) is a strange work given its extreme position. I do believe it is worth reading this 25-page document but if you are too in a hurry, here are some excerpts with my comments in italics. I have already mentioned my concerns about IP in Is Intellectual Property out of Breath? or Patents inhibit innovation, let’s delete them! (though I was not the author of this title!) or finally Is there something rotten in the kingdom of VC?. So you see the topic is not new to me.



[Page 1]
There is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity […] there is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.

[Page 2] There is little doubt that providing a monopoly as a reward for innovation increases the incentive to innovate. There is equally little doubt that granting a monopoly for any reason has the many ill consequences we associate with monopoly power – the most important and overlooked of which is the strong incentive of a government granted monopolist to engage in further political rent-seeking to preserve and expand his monopoly or, for those who do not yet have it, to try obtaining one.

About the Diffusion of Innovation [pages 2-3]
A second widely cited benefit of patent systems – although not so much in the economics literature – is the notion that patents are a substitute for socially costly trade secrecy and improve communication about ideas. […] More to the point, companies typically instruct their engineers developing products to avoid studying existing patents so as to be spared subsequent claims of willful infringement.
This I can confirm with the following answer I got once, when trying to licence IP for firm XXX: “The XXX lawyers advise the XXX employees not to read patent applications or patents from non-employees because that might preclude the XXX employees from future invitations in that area. If you are interested in selling the intellectual property, the only time XXX has ever bought IP is when there was already a start-up trying to market that IP.”

About Pharma [pages 4-5]
Generally the fixed cost of producing software is low – although it is estimated that Apple spent 150 million USD developing the iPhone. This, however, pales in comparison to the cost of developing new medicines – which is estimated to have a present value of closer to 1 billion USD – the same way it does in front of that for developing a new model of automobile, which is in the same range. Interestingly it is also true that – according to both survey and anecdotal evidence – patents play an important role in encouraging innovation in the pharmaceutical industry while playing a minor one in that of cars, insofar as new components and even plants are often developed by consortia or joint-ventures of otherwise fiercely competitive producers marketing different automobile’s brands. The relevance of patents in the pharmaceutical industry is most likely not due to the high fixed costs but rather the fact that disclosure in the case of drugs is more meaningful than in that of cars and most other products [Semiconductor is another good example similar to automobile]. The chemical formula and the efficacy of the cure as established by clinical trials are available to competitors essentially for free and it is the second (a public good, privately produced due to a political choice) that accounts for about 80% of the initial fixed cost. […] Hence various economists, holding differing views about intellectual property, have nevertheless argued that if government intervention is indeed needed in this market a system of prizes would be far superior to the existing system of monopolies.

About IP and Mature Innovations [page 5]
As the industry matures, demand stabilizes and becomes much less elastic; the scope for cost-reducing innovations decreases, the benefits of monopoly power grow and the potential for additional product innovation also shrinks. Typically there is a “shake-out” in which many firms either leave the industry or are bought out. The automobile industry is a classical historical example but the much more recent “bursting” of the dotcom “bubble” is, in fact, one we may recall better and that makes this point even more forcefully. At this stage rent-seeking does become important and patents are widely used to inhibit innovation, prevent entry, and encourage exit.
[Page 11] Nor, apparently, most industrial organization researchers, seem interested in figuring out why patents are either ignored or scarcely used in new and competitive industries while being highly valued and over-used in mature and highly concentrated ones.
[Page 20] In new industries such as biotechnology and software where innovation was thriving in the absence of patents – patents have been introduced. Given this continued extension has there been a substantial increase in innovation in recent years? On the contrary, it is apparent that the recent explosion of patents in the U.S., the E.U. and Japan, has not brought about anything comparable in terms of useful innovations and aggregate productivity.

I add here that neither the microprocesseur, nor the Internet were ever patented; when the internet was finally opened to commercial applications or when the patent on the transistor was licensed to many players in the 50s (which is quite close to putting it in the public domain), then new innovations multiplied.

About Patent Trolls and NPEs (Non Practicing Entities) [page 8]
Despite the fact that patents are mostly used for arms races and that these, in turn, are driven by patent trolls, there are not formal models of the way in which this can inefficiently inhibit entry. In the arms race theory, if all firms get counterbalancing patent portfolios and all innovate, then they would have innovated in the absence of patents – hence patents do not serve to encourage innovation. On the other hand if (like Microsoft or other patent trolls) you do not produce a marketable product you cannot be countersued, and so you can use patents to share the profits without doing the work – hence patents do discourage innovation and are a pure waste from a social standpoint.

The Patent System is Broken, But can it be Fixed? [Pages 9-10]
There is little dispute among economists that a well-designed patent system would serve to encourage innovation. There is dispute among economists about whether the patent system as it exists serves to encourage innovation – but, again, there is little dispute among economists that the patent system as it exists is broken.[…] If a well-designed patent system would serve the intended purpose, why recommend abolishing it? Why not, instead, reform it? To answer the question we need to investigate the political economy of patents: why has the political system resulted in the patent system we have? Our argument is that it cannot be otherwise. […] On the one hand we find the traditional advocacy of ideal patents as designed by a benevolent planner and, on the other hand, the recognition that patent laws are mostly designed by interest groups keen to increase their monopoly rents, not aggregate welfare.

No Incentive for Reform [page 12]
The basic public choice observation recalled earlier implies that there are many players in the patent game but that “consumers” are not among them. On the side of the potential patentees there are individual inventors, corporate inventors and patent trolls who invent nothing but never-the-less fill out patent applications making claims. On the other side is the patent office that issues patents, the patent lawyers who file and litigate patents, and the courts where the litigation takes place. The rules of the game are established – although only in part – by the executive and legislative branches of government, and insofar as the interests of the general public are concerned, it is these players who represent them. Since patenting is a technical subject about which few voters know anything with clarity – and hardly any are likely to have a detailed empirical knowledge of the consequences of patent systems – the interests of voters are not well represented at all, but rather the competing interests of the other players. […]It should be clear, then, that given this set of players and their incentives, the patent game can have only one equilibrium over time, which is the one we have observed. […]At each stage of this process of enlargement the main driving force were the rent-seeking efforts of large, cash rich companies unable to keep up with new and creative competitors. Patent lawyers, patent officials and wannabe patent trolls usually acted as foot soldiers.

Abolishing Patents[page 20]
Abolishing patents may seem “pie-in-the-sky” and there are certainly many interim measures that can be taken to mitigate the damage: properly interpreting obviousness, requiring genuine disclosure of working methods and an independent invention defense against patent infringement are useful and – among economists – relatively uncontroversial measures. But why use a band-aid to staunch a major wound? Economists fought for decades – and ultimately with great success – to abolish trade restrictions. It will not escape the careful reader that patents are very much akin to trade restrictions as they prevent the free entry of competitors in national markets, thereby reducing the growth of productive capacity and slowing down economic growth. The same way that trade restrictions were progressively reduced until reaching (almost complete) abolition, a similar (albeit, hopefully less slow) approach should be adopted to “get rid” of patents. Moreover the nature of patents as time-limited makes it relatively easy to phase them out by phasing in ever shorter patent durations. This conservative approach has also the advantage that if reducing patent terms indeed has a catastrophic effect on innovation the process can easily be reversed.
[…]
Patents should be allowed only when monopoly power is justified by evidence about fixed costs and actual lack of appropriability.
[…]
The results of federally subsidized research cannot lead to the creation of new private monopolies but should be available to all market participants. This reform would be particularly useful for the pharmaceutical industry.

I have not read (yet) their Against Intellectual Monopoly but I should given the depth of their thought. As they themselves claim, this may all be “pie in the sky”, irrealistic and therefore useless, and I also see the Libertarianism behind all this. But once again, I believe it is worth thinking about it twice, and longer than just reading this long summary.

Deezer, a new French success story?

I do not often talk about french start-ups, but after my recent blog on Parrot, it would be a mistake not to mention Deezer’s latest financing round. If you do not know Deezer’s music service, just try it!

Deezer has been founded by two young French entrepreneurs (28 and 32 at the time of foundation), its seed investor was Xavier Niel, the famous founder of Free, and was backed by AGF Private Equity, DotCorp (the holding of the Pixmania founders) as well as Orange. It made a lot of buzz yesterday when it announced its new huge round with Access Industries, the owner of Warner Music. The beauty of private companies in France is that, though they are not public, you can find information of their shareholders thanks to Infogreffe, the French register of commerce. It will only cost you a few Euros. So… here is the cap. table I could build from the info I grabbed. Not fully accurate probably. I do not have the CEO or COO shares. And Access may buy more shares from existing shareholders (which may explain why the news mentions a $130M round and not €70M I have in the table).

Not a success story yet, but promising for sure!


Click on table to enlarge

Getting to plan B (or to a Better Business Model)

It’s the second book I read from Randy Komisar (after the Monk and the Riddle) and I have to admit I preferred his first book even if Getting to Plan B is quite good too. I might have been slightly misled by the title even though the subtitle was quite clear, Breaking Through to a Better Business Model. But it might be I never read seriously subtitles. I thought the book was about what you do when you were wrong first. But it is more subtle. It is not so much about what happens if your idea was not good vs. what about finding a better or valid business model. If it says better, you plan A might have been good enough! The other reason I was not totally convinced comes from my feeling the case studies were chosen to illustrate a theory, a process, a framework, but did not prove it. I had the feeling the same case studies might have been used to illustrate opposite views, but again, who am I to say such things!

Mullins and Komisar’s book remains a very good book thanks to a rich variety of cases and lessons. In their preface, the authors say important things. “Entrepreneurship is not easy. [..] they are countless tales of companies that quickly went down in flames. Ultimately [many of them] failed because the economics of their business model didn’t work” [Page viii]. I was a little puzzled because I am not so sure; many companies failed because customers did not buy. But it might be the same! The authors claim “they developed a process and a framework to discover the best business model” [page ix]. Again I am puzzled, I am not sure this exists. But still, they certainly provide interesting tools.

One of the most interesting one is the use of analog and antilogs, that I had already mentioned when reviewing Ries’ Lean Start-up. Again For the iPod, the Sony Walkman was an Analog (“people listen to music in a public place using earphones”) and Napster was an Antilog (“although people were willing to download music, they were not willing to pay for it”). Analogs are successful predecessors worth mimicking in some way whereas antilogs are predecessors (whether successful or not) in light of which one explicitely decides to do things differently [Page 14]. But when they claim Apple’s plan B was to transform itself from a struggling PC maker to a consumer electronics powerhouse [page 21] , I find the broadness of the plan B concept really too broad!

Then their methodical dashboard is about validating leaps of faith by testing hypotheses. And what is new compared to other important references such as Steve Blank’s customer development is the focus on the business model through 5 elements: revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, working capital and investments.

Business model element Relevant analogs and the numbers they give you Relevant antilogs Leaps of faith around which you will build your current dashboard Hypotheses that will prove or refute your leaps of faith
Revenue model
Gross margin model
Operating model
Working capital model
Investment model

Why plan A won’t work? The authors answer, page 3, by quoting Albert Page: “it takes 58 new product ideas to deliver a single successful new product”. And a few lines below, “figuring out what the customer wants is not easy.” PayPal worked on its plan G! Google’s plan C works. Plan A had no revenue model, plan B was licensing, plan C was advertising. (But remember Google was always a search engine. In terms of product, it was still plan A! That is why I said before I was misled by the title Getting to Plan B)

They begin chapter 1 with the following: “Mediocre success – finding a passable business but missing the real potential – is equally problematic. Arguably, it’s worse than missing the target completely because it will tie down your considerable talent in a venture with no real future. You and other entrepreneurs and innovators like you are the lifeblood of today’s economy. And to waste your talent on something mediocre would be a real shame.”

Now the book shows that success does not have only one way. The Silverglide case [pages 74-78] shows that an entrepreneur can succeed with $80k for friends and family money whereas I am not even sure how many hundreds of millions Jeff Bezos needed before reaching profitability for Amazon.com [pages 186-192]. Many case studies illustrate how to optimize each of the 5 business models elements [chapters 3-7], whereas chapter 8 shows that you will need to find a balanced solution trying to get the best of these 5 key financial objectives. Amazon.com needed to reach a very large size to make its automated process worthwhile but “great lessons are born from leaps of faith” [page 192].

I fully agree with their final chapter’s early sentence: “As you know by now, this is not a book about business planning. It’s about, in a sense, business discovering. Quoting Eisenhower, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” or McArthur: “No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy”. So again, the building blocks of the process are:
– an identified customer pain and a solution or an opportunity to offer delight,
– some relevant analogs and antilogs,
– which lead to some as-yet-untested leaps of faith,
– which lead to a set of hypotheses to test them,
– a dashboard to focus your attention on what’s most important right now and to provide some mid-course corrections,
– all comprehensively organized, in just the right sequence, to inform and create the five elements of your business model.

[page 208]

Does this mean you need a plan B right from the start? The answer [page 212] is nice: “There’s a temptation to think that, since plan A probably won’t work, you should have plan B in your hip pocket. Don’t do it. A contingency plan would probably be just as flawed.”

There is clearly in the eraly 21st century a new trend in that business plans may not be a sufficient tool, not to say even necessary. From Randy Komisar, through Eric Ries, to Steve Blank (including my recent account of Cohen’s Winning opportunities), the important element is the discovering process of your business, of your customers in an iterative and flexible manner. This is clearly an important lesson to remember.