Agreed. Grow at all costs is what incubates the "fail fast" approach, which I, personally, disagree with. There's a reason why you need to spend most of your time designing and architecting and jump to implementation only when the viability of the solution has been justified. And part of this justification has to be a solid business model that has a clear road to profits. And a path to profit that's not decades away. As things stand, it looks like most startups want to exit through an acquisition and not ever have to talk profits.
Huh? If investors demand immediately profitability, wouldn't that push companies to "fail fast" even more? The point of failing fast is to spend as little time as possible working on the wrong ideas, i.e. to find 'market fit' as soon as possible.
Time spent designing and architecting isn't free either and, for a lot of people, 'implementing' is the only viable means of testing designs and architecture, and more importantly whether there are any (potential) customers.
An "exit through an acquisition" is a perfectly sensible goal if acquisitions are common or expected. It's pretty common in (some) other industries, e.g. pharmaceuticals.
> Time spent designing and architecting isn't free either and, for a lot of people, 'implementing' is the only viable means of testing designs and architecture, and more importantly whether there are any (potential) customers.
That's exactly the problem I see. We're going about it backwards. Shouldn't you start something because you have a customer need and not start something and then find a customer?
