Two Stage ventures and the ESLC?

In part due to the lack of funding in the post-bubble days, my partners and I have seen a number of companies take a very lean & mean approach to their development process. They have then engaged a firm like Altus Alliance to take a similarly lean & mean approach to initial go-to-market entry. Tim Oren's has written his take on an approach along these lines that he characterizes as a "Two Stage Venture" where stage one is run extremely lean and stage two is when venture funding may make sense. One of the likely byproducts is a company that gets a better valuation than if they went for more funding earlier in the process.