What’s the Tempo of Your Start-up?
By: Anton Brevde
Tags: Company Culture, Entrepreneurship, Founders, Startup, Venture Capital

What’s the Tempo of Your Start-up?

We’ve recently had a number of amazing new team members come on board which is always a good opportunity to get a fresh perspective on your company culture¹. One comment that keeps coming up is how fast we move and the sense of urgency we operate with. This is partially driven by exciting external events that demand it but it’s also our default internal state. If something non-urgent can be done next week or today, we always default to today. As our partner, Tony Robbins, often playfully says, “when would now be a good time?” This is certainly not a surprise to anyone who knows our founding GP, Dakin Sloss, as speed is one of his hallmarks.

It’s well understood that startups need to move fast². I think Reid Hoffman distills it best by explaining that speed is one of the only strengths a startup has against incumbents with orders of magnitude more resources. In the early stages, speed is critical because almost all startups start Default Dead, as Paul Graham would say.

Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they [the startup] make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? -Paul Graham

The way to escape death is by iterating your product or service until you reach product-market fit. As a result, the faster you can iterate, the greater your likelihood of success. In the later stages, post-product-market fit, you’re much more likely to face competitors and speed is critical to scale and capture market share.

However, it can be hard to know when you’re heads-down running a startup if you’re moving fast enough — there are no standardized benchmarks to compare yourself to. I certainly didn’t know when I was running Asseta. Now as an investor, it’s much easier to compare the relative tempos of many startups. From this perspective, it becomes quite obvious to see the correlation between speed and results.

This topic reminded me of one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, a wonderful Radiolab episode on cities³. It opens with psychology professor Bob Levine from California State University discussing his theory on how speed is a major factor in what gives cities their unique feel. He ran an experiment where he measured the average time that it took citizens in a given city to walk 60 feet at a certain time of day. It turns out that each city has its own unique pace or rhythm and Levine posits that this rhythm accounts for a large part of how a city feels.

Average time for citizens to cover 60 feet: Copenhagen: 10.1 seconds Dublin: 10.76 seconds Oslo: 12.2 seconds Mumbai: 14.4 seconds Liberia: 27 seconds

Whether the city conforms to its citizens or vice versa is an open question but I think it’s safe to assume that someone that moves from Liberia to Cophengan will get a bit of a pep in their step. The corollary is that companies also have their own rhythm but the difference is that they have control over what it is.

I believe that the strongest lever to shift the speed of a startup is the pace and urgency of the founder/CEO. Like most parts of company culture, it defaults to the DNA of the founders unless set otherwise. If you’re not happy with how fast your company is moving, I would suggest reflecting on how you can increase your own urgency in a productive way. I’ve seen first hand how that can cascade throughout an organization.

Footnotes