Masters of time
The difference that makes a difference between the blow-out successes and the rest: time
Hey! It’s Andreas from Monetisation Matters, the home of in-depth articles and actionable insights on Strategy and Monetisation. Built for Founders, Product, and Product Marketing leaders as they navigate their $1m to $100m growth journeys. This month’s article dives into why it’s important to move fast, and the ways in which a business can do so.
It’s impossible to know which startups will become blow-out successes — if it were easy, most investments wouldn’t lose money or yield small returns. Out of 20 investments, only 2 or 3 will reach their potential. The rest, despite starting with just as much promise, get filtered out along the path to $100M in revenue. Venture capital invests in the world’s optimists, founders who have total conviction in achieving a highly improbable outcome. A lot of time is spent trying to identify what separates the ones that make it from the rest - the differences that make a difference. Time should undoubtedly be on that list.
“The speed at which a company learns, iterates, and executes is the strongest predictor of its success. Executing with urgency always beats a perfect plan. Amazon, Tesla, Apple, and Nvidia share one critical trait they’ve maintained despite their enormous scale: the relentless ability to reinvent their businesses and capitalize on emerging opportunities faster than anyone else in their respective markets.”
Kamil Mieczakowski, Notion Capital
Why it matters - but does it always matter?
First of all, venture capital funded businesses are only viable for as long as they have external funding. Funding buys time to make the progress needed to secure the next round. Insufficient progress creates a distressed situation for even promising businesses. Less funding, or a premature shift towards break-even can quickly knock a fragile startup off of the venture track.
“Move faster. Slowness anywhere justifies slowness everywhere. Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize.”
Sam Altman
Secondly, as we are seeing with AI, the environment is moving much faster than it was even a few years ago. New announcements come thick and fast. The latest change as I write this is the release of DeepSeek. Something OpenAI and others will need to make sense of. The faster the external environment changes, the faster a business needs to move. If it does not match the speed of change on average it will eventually lose fit and decline.
Matching rates of change also applies to internal functions. Their tempo and rhythm needs to match if it wants to act as a cohesive whole. For example, Sales' ability to acquire new logos faster than CS can onboard them does not lead to better performance of the system as a whole - and probably a lot of internal and customer friction. Timing matters - not just speed. Doing something out of sequence, no matter how quickly, is in my opinion more damaging than moving slowly - it wastes valuable funding as well as time.
I feel the need, the need for speed
The speed of what? How fast you build a product, or acquire new customers usually comes to mind. But that’s not all. In Patterns of Strategy, Patrick Hoverstadt covers three aspects to time:
Cycle time: how quickly you can make decisions and operate a core process
Foresight: your ability to look ahead and anticipate possible futures
Change rate: how quickly you can adapt existing capabilities and build new ones
Given the low maturity of startups, and their fragile state, the speed at which they can make decisions and learn is particularly important. John Boyd created the OODA loop specifically to speed up decision making. Developed for fighter pilots, the idea was to cycle through the loop faster than your opponent can, influencing and disrupting their actions. In a competitive game, you want to “get inside your opponent's loop” so that they are reacting to your tempo rather than setting it. An OODA loop is used by emergency drivers in the UK, embodied in the system of car control that enables faster and safer driving. In this case there is no opponent. It isn’t about disrupting a competitor. So OODA is applicable to single player and adversarial activities alike.
OODA stands for observe; orientate; decide; and act. One could look at each phase in turn and find opportunities to speed things up.
Observe: How fast can we collect information?
Whether we are talking about a fighter pilot, emergency driver, or startup, observation happens across the entire loop. Information fuels decision making. Having the right information available is a source of speed. So is giving decision making authority to the people who have the information to act. Speed is one of the core arguments for distributed authority.
Internal information requirements should be straight forward to get a handle on. It just takes some effort and investment. RevOps plays a critical role here ensuring an appropriate data model and reporting is set up. Unfortunately there is a general lack of investment in data infrastructure and reporting no matter the size or maturity of business. Informal information flows matter just as much as formal, sometimes more. A big loss of working from home is missing out on these water cooler conversations. There is a good argument to be made to move people around an organisation so that their expertise and knowhow can spread more effectively through the business.
Informal and formal networks that bring information from outside act as valuable invisible assets. Having formal structures set up such as customer advisory boards, regular customer surveys, or QBRs saves enormous time. Looking back on my time as a consultant where a client would spend $100k+ and months to conduct customer research seems absurd. They should have already been plugged into their customers through established channels to ask the questions they need to quickly.
Informal relationships that stretch outside of the business are just as valuable as the internal water cooler moments. Relationships between functional peers through e.g. the Pavilion network, or investor connections are low cost and can be extremely valuable. A key benefit of being part of Notion Capital’s portfolio is the formal and informal networks we set up for our investments. Functional events, WhatsApp groups, webinars etc. all exist to get people across the portfolio connected and talking.
Orientate: How fast can we incorporate new information?
At the heart of the orientate phase is information processing and modelling. An established model allows information to be processed quickly and the implications ‘spat’ out for decision makers to consider. If you lack a model you need to build one, that takes time. For example, market entry decisions are quicker if you already have a framework in place. You don’t need to re-build an approach from scratch every time you consider entering a new market. Models don’t have the be formal and explicit, they could be based on simple heuristics or implicit based on cultural norms and accepted organisational insight.
Decision: How fast can you decide on a course of action?
If the right information is available, and a suitable model is in place to assess the implications of different routes forward then decision making should be relatively quick. Splitting decisions into one-way (irreversible) vs. two-way decisions speeds the process up further for lower consequence decisions. It protects against over-analysis of decisions where it would be better to act, review and adjust than agonize over what to do. Decisions can still get stuck, especially when a functional leader is trying to optimise for their function first, rather than the business as a whole - in those cases it’s necessary to disagree and commit.
Act: How fast can we act?
Action will depend on if you have the capability and resources in place to execute, and to what extent existing capabilities have been optimised. If the right capabilities to execute aren’t in place, speed depends on Patrick Hoverstadt’s ‘change rate’ dimension. There is a tension here between optimised capabilities, and retaining flexibility to make fundamental changes or build new capabilities.
Highly optimised processes have faster cycle times. By definition there is less redundancy and flexibility in the system. Founders face a dilemma: optimise and drive greater efficiency, or maintain a level of redundancy to pivot when needed. If you compress time for a given process, you are elongating time when it comes to making a meaningful change to that process. The insight here is to be thoughtful over the capabilities you choose to optimise. You may be gaining time in the short term and degrading your ability to make changes in future.
Feedforward: What might happen?
Feedforward isn’t a phase. It happens along the entire loop. As information comes in, you feed it forward through your models to anticipate the action you may need to take. It can be used to update models before decision points are reached and further speeds up decision making. Shell uses a version of feedforward, scenario planning to speed up decision making. They have been using scenarios as a key input to their planning process for over 50 years. Its purpose is not to predict the future, but to model possible futures. The process helps managers to confront potential blind spots and make quicker decisions.
Focus
“Our companies ran at higher velocity, with higher standards and a narrower focus than most. Going faster, maintaining higher standards and with a narrower aperture.” Frank Slootman
Slootman’s businesses didn’t run faster with a narrower focus. They ran faster because they had a narrower focus. Focus allows concentration of resources. Think about the enormous energy required for SpaceX’s Starship to lift off. 33 boosters pointing in the same direction. None of those 33 were pointing sideways or in random directions. It’s common sense - if you have resources concentrated on a narrow goal - you are going to move quickly.
Were you rushing or were you dragging?
Terence Fletcher: Why do you suppose I just hurled a chair at your head, Nieman
Andrew: I-I don't know.
Terence: Fletcher: Sure, you do.
Andrew: The tempo?
Terence Fletcher: Were you rushing or were you dragging? Andrew: I-I don't know.
Whiplash
A more nuanced view of tempo than ‘faster is better’ is to move at an appropriate speed depending on the circumstances - not rushing or dragging. Rushing could translate into a lack of focus, executing out of sequence or an accelerating burn; dragging, a lack of progress and missed opportunities.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast - a saying originating in the US Navy reflects the sentiment that faster isn’t always better. In a military context it refers to building up accurate muscle memory during training, and then executing movements precisely in the field under pressure. Moving slowly, to build up muscle memory buys time later. One of the biggest fuckups we see is when startups rush for growth when they haven’t built up muscle memory - expanding Sales headcount despite a broad ICP, uninspiring messaging, and a lack of a repeatable sales motion. “More companies die of indigestion than starvation” - trying to run before they can walk.
The reality is that every business is in a perpetual state of under- and over-investment. It’s inevitable given the complex web of dependencies between functions, and lags between making an investment and seeing its impact. A sensible heuristic is to focus on identifying and removing key bottlenecks, combined with an appreciation for the lags inherent in the system. The best founders use foresight to remove limiting factors in the right order, so the business builds and maintains its momentum.
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