I think there are two different problems here: building a good solution, and building a solution for a problem that people have to begin with.
If you /don't know/ if there will be any customers for your product (no matter how well-built it might be), spending time and money on building a very solid v1 is a waste. Sure you will have experience that you can leverage in your next venture, but that's an extremely expensive way to get it. And if you're bootstrapping, or have hired other people, you're potentially spending the financial stability of you or your employees to get this experience.
If you /do know/ you will have customers (either because you're sure it's a problem people have, or you've got people giving you money for basic R&D without any guarantee of returns), then I completely agree with you and the author -- build the product right and it will pay dividends later on.
In the prototype-then-throw-away model, you might not get the engineers' best development work, but you will get the best brainstorming and design work, because everybody's comfortable adjusting the product until they're confident they have something that people want. If you marry yourself to it beforehand, if you commit people's livelihoods to it, people will naturally try to rationalize what they're doing because they're committing so much to it, even if it's wrong. And if you've got the smartest people working with you, they'll be incredibly good at it. This creates a much bigger problem years down the line if it fails.
If you /don't know/ if there will be any customers for your product (no matter how well-built it might be), spending time and money on building a very solid v1 is a waste. Sure you will have experience that you can leverage in your next venture, but that's an extremely expensive way to get it. And if you're bootstrapping, or have hired other people, you're potentially spending the financial stability of you or your employees to get this experience.
If you /do know/ you will have customers (either because you're sure it's a problem people have, or you've got people giving you money for basic R&D without any guarantee of returns), then I completely agree with you and the author -- build the product right and it will pay dividends later on.
In the prototype-then-throw-away model, you might not get the engineers' best development work, but you will get the best brainstorming and design work, because everybody's comfortable adjusting the product until they're confident they have something that people want. If you marry yourself to it beforehand, if you commit people's livelihoods to it, people will naturally try to rationalize what they're doing because they're committing so much to it, even if it's wrong. And if you've got the smartest people working with you, they'll be incredibly good at it. This creates a much bigger problem years down the line if it fails.