As a company, Trinsic has moved faster and faster over time. And the faster we ship, the more I’ve learned about the importance of speed.
I asked ChatGPT to make a tech CEO banging the gong of moving fast. Pretty accurate?
Pre-product/market fit startups should be focused exclusively on PMF. This requires us to discover something new. By definition, this is unknown—if it were easy, it’d already be done. The process of discovery, however, is known: make smart bets quickly.
I really like that last sentence. Make smart bets quickly. Each word is important. In fact, they’re probably listed in order of theoretical importance. But they’re listed in reverse order of practical importance. Practically, we’re already making the smartest bets we can—and the way we get smarter is to do each one faster.
Top performers are always trying to hone their craft. Here I seek to write down some of the things that have helped me hone my ability to move fast in hopes that it’s helpful to you. These points apply to any kind of knowledge work—meaning, everyone at Trinsic.
There are many tactical things we can each do to move faster. Copilot/AI tooling, blocks of uninterrupted time, managing notifications properly, high-leverage collaboration with teammates, take care of our physical/mental health, and more. This post is less about tactical things and more about principles.
At Trinsic your effort should translate directly into impact. Before going on, a quote from our Trinsic’s work expectations document: “Except for the causal/direct relationship it has with ingenuity and impact, the time you spend working at Trinsic is completely irrelevant.”
That’s 100% true… but misleading. It is written to emphasize an important point, thereby de-emphasizing the rest. Written another way, the sentence could say “The time you spend working at Trinsic has a causal/direct relationship with your ingenuity and impact.” It takes hard work to accomplish great things.
Working more hours is the lowest-hanging fruit for accomplishing more in less time. (It should go without saying that you won’t be maximally impactful/fast if you burn out. So don’t.)
Higher-hanging fruits that will help you move fast exist too. For example, finding ways to do tasks in less time. Because most tasks aren’t fixed, it’s rare that a 10-hour task can’t become a 9-hour task. Yes, a woman can’t make a full-term baby in 6 months… but that’s because there are not creative ways to speed up gestation. There are often creative ways to accomplish things faster in business.
Another way to move fast is to say “no” to more things—professionally and personally. Getting your most important work done should be priority #1. If you’re under the gun, it may be better for you to say no to a recurring meeting, customer calls, fun/team gatherings, etc. (with proper notice). Being a part of an elite team also requires you make hard trade-offs in your personal life too.*
Finally, working hard and working long are two different things. Working hard is a high-hanging fruit because it requires focus and discipline. Learning to work hard is a skill. It involves avoiding distractions, finding your flow state, setting the proper environment, taking care of yourself, and much more.
The reality is that startups are demanding. Jeff Bezos said it well in ‘97, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon you can’t choose two out of three.”
Time spent deliberating is time not spent on getting things done. (At Ramp, they say “Any second you spend planning is a second you don’t spend doing.”) That said, smarter decisions can be exponentially impactful, whereas spending more time on something generally has a linear relationship to impact. And being decisive in the wrong direction can result in negative velocity. That said, as long as decisions are reversible and we’re getting feedback quickly, the downside of slightly-off decisions is lower than you think, and the upside of moving fast is higher than you think.
Our Trinsineers - culture document outlines our expectation that Trinsineers bias to action. This means we make all but irreversible decisions quickly. We also say you should “fight anything slowing you down.” I mean it. Bring on the heat, bring on the confrontation, if something is a problem you need to fight it.
First of all, there really are no deadlines in a startup. The deadline is now. Every second we’re not making contact with reality, we’re not generating new information, and not decreasing our odds of death. Startups are default dead—Trinsic is default dead. We only survive by discovering a product/market fit secret that will propel us into growth, and the timeline we can do that on is dependent upon the rate we can uncover new information.
Deadlines are funny. They’re demotivating and downright oppressive if applied upon you without your input. But if you’re giving input as an accountable party, your incentive is always to give “safe” estimates. For example, when I’m with a customer, if I know we’ll have a feature done in 2 weeks, I’ll tell them it’ll be done in a month—because if I miss the deadline, I’m on the hook. Better to over-promise and under-deliver, right? With external parties like customers and investors, maybe. Internally, no.