The Quickest Way to Build a Failed Startup
If the goal of entrepreneurship is really to “fail fast,” then entrepreneurs are succeeding at an alarming rate
Entrepreneurship is often depicted as a fast-paced, high-risk, high-stakes game where decisions need to be made quickly. “Move fast and break things!” people tell us.
“Fail fast!”
“Iterate quickly!”
“Perfection is the enemy of done!”
“Time kills all deals!”
“Strike while the iron is hot!”
You get the point. In entrepreneurship, speed is currency, and if you’re not moving forward quickly, you might as well not be moving forward at all.
But is speed actually as useful in entrepreneurship as we’re taught to believe? Or does moving fast actually cause too many things to break?
These questions of speed in entrepreneurship have been on my mind a lot recently because I spend most of my time working with young (i.e. college-aged) founders. When it comes to fast, they’re the types of entrepreneurs who could launch and shut down three different companies in a week… and I’m only slightly exaggerating. I literally worked with a pair of co-founders who had three massive pivots in a month before…