Fail Fast vs. Zero Burn

Mark Suster has a nice post about the "fail fast" method. He rails against fail fast, and rightly so. He writes:

I have met so many young entrepreneurs who tell me, “we don’t need business plans anymore, there a waste!  We’re going to put our product out there and fail fast!”... or they tell me, “we’ll launch a bunch of products and see what works.”  That is the old “throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks” approach.  It’s intellectually lazy and I doubt many great companies are born this way.

We definitely agree with Mark's view. In fact our plans are extensive and they take time and money to create for one reason: the goal is to never fail. Of course most of the venture community (and the broader innovation community) thinks this is impossible, but as we have shown with over two-decades of successful product launches, it is possible by using scientific methods to understand markets and customer needs. The problem is not with the idea of creating a business plan, it is with the inputs to the plan. The inputs (i.e. the definition of a market and a customer need) have to change, otherwise creating the plan will not result in a higher chance of success.