Up to 95% of startups fail. Whether failure means liquidated assets, zero return on investment (ROI) or the inability to achieve stated goals, it’s a norm for young companies. In the tech industry, dashed dreams are so common that there’s a culture around the “art of failing upward.”

Turning negatives into positives isn’t a strategy. Founders and investors aren’t seeking doomed enterprises. They’re looking for success — and quickly. This century, they’ve tended to look to one model: the lean startup.

The Lean Startup Sweeps The Valley

Popularized by Eric Ries’s 2011 book “The Lean Startup,” this type of company adheres to principles of rapid, flexible experimentation. If statistics say you’ll probably fail, why not immediately test your fate? Build a minimum viable product (MVP), see if it sticks with a customer or user base. If it does, keep going. If not, pivot.

It was a novel idea for a simple reason: It rejected conventional wisdom. For decades, entrepreneurs were told to begin by outlining costs and opportunities. They needed multiyear projections for income, profit and cash flow. The assumption was that business success could be engineered.

The digital revolution changed everything. Wait five years — wait one year — and your technology was obsolete, and your customers had lost interest. In this sense, the lean startup was about aligning with reality, which meant that it, too, was subject to change.

Becoming A Third-Path Company By Being Pragmatic