Outcomes get remembered; methods get checked later
Detours are forgotten once a company arrives. Shortcuts are a different matter, because someone usually goes back to look.
No one remembers how you got there, only that you got there.
Few people who send money through PayPal know that it began as a way to beam IOUs between Palm Pilots. Nintendo sold playing cards for most of a century before it made its first video game. Once a company arrives somewhere, the route it took shrinks to an anecdote. That is the observation behind this line, attributed to Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, Inc. and Mahalo and host of the show This Week in Startups. The exact wording circulates in quote collections without a traceable first appearance, so it is best judged on its own terms.
Read that way, the line is a comfort for founders in the middle of a messy stretch. The first product failed, the team shrank, the pitch changed three times. None of it will matter much if the company finds something that works, because the story will be retold from the ending backward. Founders who are embarrassed by their detours can stop being embarrassed. The detours are normal and, afterward, mostly invisible. Investors, too, judge most founders on where the company ends up, and a founder who spent a year on the wrong product is rarely asked about it once the right one is working.
Where the line misleads is when “how” means conduct rather than route. People forget detours. They do not reliably forget shortcuts that hurt someone. In 2009 several social gaming companies were found to be earning heavily from misleading lead-generation offers, and the practice became a public scandal that forced changes across the industry. Napster reached tens of millions of users and was then shut down by the courts over how it had grown. In both cases the method was not only remembered. It was the part that came back.
Small professional worlds also have long memories. Investors, early employees and business partners talk to one another. A founder who arrived by breaking promises to co-founders, or by misleading early investors, may find that the success is remembered and so is the way it was reached, the next time money needs raising.
So the line is right about the path and wrong about the ethics. Change direction as often as the evidence requires, and do not worry about how the pivots will look. Take care with anything that someone would later have reason to dig up.