Let's not go immediately to extremes -- obviously some sort of things work better than some others. It's not as if there is no definition at all out there. Things like incremental releases, getting close to the customer, or wealth versus money are true no matter how your startup is configured or where it operates.

I think the analogy might best be put at the borderline between flying-chicken-man and the Sopwith. Obviously there are some folks that are flying, and flying reliably, obviously some things work and some things don't -- so now is the time to start writing it all down and sorting it out.

The problem is that we can't even see the airplanes of the folks who are flying -- we just get to hear the cool stories about how they got from point A to point B.

I look at places like DreamWorks which are able to capture "lightning in a bottle" over and over again or some of the serial entrepreneurs out there, and think that it is possible to take highly variable environments and put a little bit of structure around them. Nowhere near as much as aviation, but like the other posters pointed out, the only reason we have that for aviation is that a lot of smoldering craters became somebody else's life lesson.