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

Aaron Dinin, PhD
Entrepreneurship Handbook
5 min readJul 25, 2024

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…

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Published in Entrepreneurship Handbook

How to succeed in entrepreneurship; feat. founder stories, design articles, and startup deep dives that inspire your entrepreneurial journey.

Written by Aaron Dinin, PhD

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke. Software Engineer. PhD in English. I write about the mistakes entrepreneurs make since I’ve made plenty. More @ aarondinin.com

Responses (10)

What are your thoughts?

The real skill is knowing how to slow down and evaluate your options thoroughly.

It all boils down to this; playing the long game!

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Research shows that repeat entrepreneurs with a previous success study/investigate/research a lot more than first time entrepreneurs before putting money at risk. I think your daughter was advocating for this approach, which she probably learned at…...

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It somehow reminds me of the concept of Expected Value.

If you deliberate ad infinitum your probability is maximum but value is 0, if you make decisions on the spot your value may be closer to maximum but probability will be close to 0.

We…...

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