I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
You can polish and iterate and double down on what the magic was. You can make a much better thing. A much cleaner thing, a much more solid thing. And that's what 'Borderlands 2' is to 'Borderlands.'
I love taking an idea... to a prototype and then to a product that millions of people use.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
Convince the investor that you guys are moving fast and that this isn't some long slog... you're thinking about it like a startup where you can move fast and make mistakes.
Sometimes these challenges naturally select more chefs that can think on their feet very quickly. There are chefs I know who won't put things on the menu unless they've tried it four or five times. So you just naturally select a certain kind of chef, people who maybe don't win a bunch of challenges but they hang around.
I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.
