Indeed, the lens is what I'm talking about. I'd go so far as to argue that you should never approach a new project as a potential company and instead just build things you find fun/useful/novel. The greatest successes (financially, world impact) I've seen have been from developers making cool projects. These eventually got traction and the developer had investors... beating down the door. At that point the project turned into a company (although not one that had revenue). Growth continued because the products were awesome and eventually led to massive acquisitions.

You could argue that they hit their MVP and that's when everything took off but the mindset was definitely "I'm going to build something cool" opposed to "I'm going to build an MVP so I can have a startup".

These founders eventually left post-acquisition and have since continued to crank out new projects without regard to commercial viability. Not what the business schools teach but they have "won" so I don't think they care.