Slowness is contagious
Speed is the essence of startups.
This sounds like a nice thing to say most people might agree with in abstraction and nod to sitting at a nice dinner, but what I have learned from working day to day on several startups in parallel is that — even when you are dealing with smart, hardworking, competent people — slowness can easily sneak in and become a dangerous contagious agent. One that can eventually kill your company if you do not deal with it.
At any stage of the company’s life, there are a bunch of objectives you need to set, and many smart people working alongside you might help you come up with what sound like intelligent and reasonable numbers. But you should be highly suspicious of whatever sounds reasonable, because reasonable isn’t what great is made of.
The truth is that slowness is the homeostatic state of all things in the universe. All things revert to cruise control, even in very good companies. Once you have wildly succeeded like Google, you can get away with lots of internal clunkiness for a long time. Even though you are no longer as mighty, your moat is so strong that no one can storm your castle. At least not for a couple of decades.
But if you are a smaller company, whether it be 5, 50 or 500 people, anything but light speed isn’t good enough. Every day, you have to be maniacal about not letting complacency creep in. The minute you do, it will actually contaminate your team and everyone will perform at a lower than they usually do. It is the same thing as what happens when you let complacency into your personal life. In fact, when you are working on a startup, there is no distinction between the two. Start skipping workouts, eating or sleeping poorly and very quickly the results will compound.
Of course, if you are good and lucky enough to have attracted great people, they will be self-motivated and go very far on their own. But if you do make the mistake of pressing your foot off the gas pedal or if you attract a few people who do not share those same standards of excellence, the whole thing can actually spill onto the A players and affect the pace and trajectory of your entire organization.
Yes, more so in the earlier days, but even until you have hundreds of people on your team, a startup is actually a very delicate house that you have to compulsively monitor and protect.
You have to make sure — at all costs — to never let slowness or mediocrity creep in.
