My philosophy re startup speed has completely changed over the last few years.
I grew up at Uber, professionally, which held speed as the absolute, ultimate goal.
Now, I still value speed, but hold quality as the binding constraint.
agree w/this point. speed gets less important the more competitive your market is. when the market is already full of crap you really need to rise above the rest
Wendell Berry wrote: there are two muses — the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought."
People dramatically under estimate how many decisions one has to make before shipping the v1 of even the simplest product. They all seem obvious in retrospect, but so, so much thinking had to happen to ship something like "press a button, get a ride."
The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook: