Actually, We Have Plenty of Time

The startup world is all about moving fast — but at what expense?

We've built this narrative for ourselves within startups that we're constantly under the gun to move quickly or else. If we don't move quickly, we won't attract more funding, we'll lose ground to all of our competitors, and we'll be perceived as being "slow," which is considered the death knell for any respectable startup.

But what if all of that is bullshit?

What if there are real costs to moving too quickly that will far outweigh whatever perceived benefits we're told we're getting? We stand to lose a lot if we invent a false notion of urgency that prevents us from making good decisions for the long term.

Pleasing the Wrong Party

Let's start with who we're moving fast for. Ideally, all of our actions should map back to what customers want, which is always the ultimate endgame. Perhaps our customers really are demanding features on a very short timeline for very good reasons, but frankly, that's kind of rare.

Instead, we're usually moving to show the perception of speed, often for the wrong audiences, such as investors. We create this narrative that investors will be way more interested in funding us if we make some short-term decisions in rapid fire that seem to align with what they feel like writing checks for today.

Or we're following trends and hype cycles. Remember when every decision had to be tying your business model to the Blockchain? How did that work out for you? By creating these false narratives of outside urgency (not tied to a customer), we begin burning cycles of distraction, not production.

Building Huts versus Castles

When we're in constant urgency mode, we naturally lean toward projects and objectives that serve a short-term need. Think about that activity as building huts for shelter. These are actions we can take quickly to provide some near-term safety and benefit, but they tend to not last long and aren't what we really want to be living in.

Conversely, building long-term shelter — castles — take way more time and planning, but those stand the test of time. No one builds a castle with short-term thinking! We can run around building huts all day, but we'll always be back to having to build them again. But if we step back and decide to build castles, we'll have something defensible forever.

In our startup, that translates to making long-term product decisions, whereby not everything we do will pay back immediately. The same goes for customer investments, like marketing or price reductions that cost us a lot now, but give us an opportunity to build a much bigger customer base in the future.

Burning Out Before the Race

The biggest cost to our urgency is actually the health of the people who work at our startup. When we only think about our startup in sprints, which are mostly what the first few years are, we've still got a fair bit of energy. We can survive some sprints.

The problem is when a few years pass, and we realize that the sprints aren't sustainable organization-wide. While we're exhausting the organization from short-term sprints, we're preventing ourselves from having enough energy to continue this journey for the long haul, which is where these races are actually won.

We don't have to buy into this narrative that the sky is constantly falling to support short-term thinking. Yes, we do have some short-term boss levels to beat, and we should do precisely that. But not at the expense of conserving time, energy, and planning for building a long-term vision that will be the glorious castle that we truly want to build.

In Case You Missed It

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