Speed comes from a habit of doing, not from haste
Most startup decisions can be reversed next week. Treating them as if they could not is where the time goes.
If you want to create something great and do it faster than the competition, you need to be action oriented.
Fred Wilson has invested in consumer web companies long enough to watch the same contest repeat. Two teams chase the same idea at roughly the same time. The one that wins is rarely the one with the better plan in the first month. It is the one that shipped something, watched what happened, and shipped again while the other was still arguing about the roadmap. Several companies in the portfolio of Union Square Ventures, which he co-founded, released early versions that looked thin and improved them in public, week after week.
Action orientation is a habit more than a talent. It shows up in small things: a question settled by building a quick version instead of scheduling a meeting, a customer called today instead of surveyed next month, a feature released to a tenth of users to see what breaks. Each step is modest. The advantage comes from how many of them a team takes in a year.
It helps to know why slow teams are slow. Usually it is not laziness. It is treating reversible choices as permanent ones. Choosing a button color, a pricing experiment, a first marketing channel: all of these can be undone in days, yet many teams debate them as if they were signing a lease. An action oriented team saves its deliberation for the few choices that are hard to reverse.
Those choices exist, and the line is a poor guide to them. Picking a co-founder, taking money from a particular investor, signing a long lease, collecting sensitive customer data, entering a regulated market: mistakes there are expensive and slow to fix. Moving fast on them is not a virtue. Neither is moving fast in a direction nobody has checked, which only reaches the wrong place sooner.
There is also a kind of busyness that passes for action. A team can ship constantly and learn nothing because no release was designed to answer a question. Wilson’s point is about acting in order to find out, and the output that matters is what the team knows afterward, not the number of releases.
The useful split, then, is to sort decisions by how easily they can be reversed, act quickly on the easy ones, and spend the saved time thinking carefully about the rest.