Ryan Gray is Co-Founder and CEO of SGW Designworks, a product engineering and design firm featured in The Lean Startup. It’s very common for a prospective client to come to our product development ...

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Amazon Fire Phone, Google Glass, New Coke and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy: What do all these products have in common? They didn’t sell.

Investors today back more than ideas—they back execution speed and proof of concept. But traditional software builds are slow, expensive, and unpredictable, raising risk for startup backers. That's ...