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- The Cult of Speed
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Specialists will tell you lateral thinking is the best way to end your week. I’m the specialists.
That being said, before we jump in a short talk about the Cult of Speed in startups, let’s see today’s lateral riddle:
A man goes to a restaurant, orders a meal, and eats it.
When the bill comes, he looks at it, smiles, and then pays it in full. However, he only ate a small fraction of what was listed on the bill.
He is not mad at the restaurant despite still being hungry. He is also not a rich man, nor is he trying to impress anyone.
Why would he do this?
An answer, as usual, at the end. And before we jump into today’s topic, here’s a word from today’s Lateral Thinking supporter.
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Don’t just build the wrong thing faster.
Now, there's a title that should be printed on t-shirts for every startup conference.
We’re all obsessed with speed. Go fast, break things, iterate, pivot. It's like we've collectively decided that the only sin is standing still. Which is a great culture hack if you have access to all the money in the world and failing just means you can start over.
In most cases, moving fast is a death sentence. Because if you fail, there’s no coming back from it - both mentally and financially. More on this topic in this great analysis:
We've been fed this narrative that success is about hyper-growth, about reaching a million users in five days like ChatGPT. That's a unicorn. That's the exception that proves the rule, and frankly, it's a dangerous distraction.
My newsfeeds are full of stories where speed was the enemy.
The real game, the one that builds lasting value, is consistency.
It's the slow, deliberate grind of understanding your customer, truly understanding them, not just collecting "feedback" on a feature you cobbled together last week.
You want to know what building the right thing looks like? Look at Shopify. From 2006 to 2013, they were adding maybe 10,000 users per year. Imagine that in today's "move fast" world. They'd be declared dead before lunch on day two. Yet, they built something that endured.
It's the same story with Basecamp, with Etsy, with Mailchimp. These weren't overnight sensations. They were companies that took years to find their rhythm, to understand their market, to build something useful that people actually wanted to pay for. They focused on consistency, on improving, on refining, not just on going faster.
"Matei, are you saying we should just sit around and do nothing?"
If you think that, you should definitely do nothing. But joke aside, you don't want to be stuck building the wrong thing forever.
Speed won't solve your problem. If you're moving too fast, you're constantly reacting to surface-level issues, never getting a chance to properly examine why something isn't working.
So rather than moving fast, move with purpose. And this applies to all facets of life.
Answer: The man was on a diet and was happy with himself that he managed to stick to it and not overeat.
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