The First Mile

CHAPTER 2

Document What You Plan to Do

The first stage in the DEFT process—document your idea—sounds innocent enough: write down what it is you are actually hoping to do. Amazingly enough, however, it is a step many innovators miss. As an example, our investment unit has reviewed close to four hundred plans over the past few years. Most of those plans deeply describe a cool technology or a massive market opportunity. Only a subset covers both. An even smaller number also describes the idea’s economics. Ever fewer talk about nitty-gritty operational details.

Adherents of the lean start-up methodology sometimes take the extreme perspective that research and thinking are useless—that learning comes only from developing prototypes and testing in-market. ...