

Yottaa Gets $9M for "Anti-Lean" Startup Approach - gthuang1
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/05/22/yottaa-looking-more-like-akamai-gets-9m-for-anti-lean-approach/

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ww520
I think the Anti-Lean term here means big capital investment and long
development cycle to build the product vs. the typical small amount of
investment and short development cycle in the Lean shops.

It doesn't invalidate the Lean development approach, just describing the
opposite of it. It's like matter vs anti-matter, which doesn't state anything
negative about matter, just having the opposite property.

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g_brett
"Lean startup" has been great but it also had its side effects - lots of
people automatically assumed it without knowing what it meant and how to apply
to a particular company. Related, it is amazing to see how many developers
think "agile development" as "no design, no documentation and no
architecture".

There are more than one way to build a great company. Hope Yottaa can share
some more data points.

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rcavezza
"lean" is about validated learning, not the size of your team.

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Ramone
The normal usage of the term "Lean" (ie from Toyota) actually has little to do
with validated learning and more to do with the elimination of wasteful
aspects of production that don't directly lead to customer value. Usually that
means "pulling" work out of a team based on need rather than trying to
anticipate need that might never materialize (like the need to scale workforce
and infrastructure, which is the case here). FTA: "The idea, he says, is to be
“global from day one and have scalability built in.”". Of course in any pull
system, validated learning is built-in, because new customer demand is new
information, but the focus of Lean is actually the reduction of wasteful
production. He'll have wasted a lot of time/money if demand doesn't match the
infrastructure he's built.

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krschultz
You are spot on. Unfortunately the 'Lean Startup' book basically overloaded a
lot of words around Lean. I love the concept in the 'Lean Startup' book, I
also love Lean methodology in manufacturing.

But it is confusing as hell to talk to people in both fields becuase a lot of
words have different meanings now.

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6ren
I'm not sure it's possible to "iterate quickly", if it takes a year to build
the product - unless you can anticipate what changes will be needed, which is
the problem Lean tries to address. However, I agree that some deep projects do
require a year (or years).

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azylman
What? Anti-lean? Lean isn't about "small teams", it's about no waste. Needing
a big team (which it sounds like these guys do) doesn't preclude you from
being lean. If you have a big team and you DON'T need it, THEN you're "anti-
lean".

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taligent
Never actually heard of this company before but they seem to be playing in a
great space IMHO. It seems to be a combination of Cloudflare, Pingdom, Akamiai
and New Relic. And for many sites having to have accounts with them all is a
hassle.

Now if they could only combine a vulnerability scanner as well ...

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mildweed
I use Yottaa as a band-aid for inherited websites at my agency. When a client
comes to us, asks us to rebuild their site and take over their old site in the
mean time, we use Yottaa to speed the heck out of their poorly-hosted, poorly
written previous site.

Also, don't be confused when the sales guys call and say they're from "Yoda".
The space muppet is the correct way to pronounce yotta, the SI prefix.

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retube
how does yottaa actually speed up websites? does it involve shifting your
website to their platform/severs?

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brk
(Currently using/testing the product).

No, you don't shift anything to their servers. They give you a long/funky
CNAME that you use for your www.foo.com DNS record. So basically all your web
traffic is going through their servers, and they "intelligently" cache static
content and/or distribute it through a CDN.

It works fairly well and is painless to deploy (mostly, had some minor issues
at first).

