Asparouhov: Lean startup methodology fails for category-defining tech companies
Delian Asparouhov · Delian Asparouhov: Inside the Walls of Founders Fund: What the World Does Not See | E1183 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 29, 2024 · at 19:06
Delian Asparouhov is a partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries. He is discussing Keith Rabois's operational frameworks for building companies.
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“It works in the world of like small SaaS businesses where you're trying to make a marginal improvement on a, you know Small, you know, industry, if you're doing workflow software for plumbers, I'm sure that is a, like, reasonable approach. I don't think that Elon Musk went around, you know, interviewing consumers about whether or not they wanted electric vehicles when he decided to go build Tesla, or, you know, asked NASA whether they want, you know, sort of cheaper and better rockets when he went to go build SpaceX. And so, I think it works for sure, a subset of companies. But if you look at the top 10 companies on the NASDAQ, Steve Jobs did not ask people for their feedback when building the iPhone. Jensen Huang did not ask people whether they, you know, sort of wanted parallel compute, you know, sort of GPUs. They just had strong visions of what they thought the future of technology looked like and went and, you know, sort of built that.”
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