Patience and speed is how founders succeed
The rhyme was unintentional, your path towards scaling your startup should not be.
I’ve heard Gary Vaynerchuk say it many times, “micro-speed, macro-patience”
In a nutshell, it’s a reprise of the “people over estimate what they can do in 1 years, underestimate what they can do in 10”.
Both mean that you have to move fast in the short term tactics, but stick to your core mission throughout the test of time.
That’s what’s unique about startup Pivots. It’s rarely a change in mission/underlying assumption...it’s almost always a shift in the strategy of how the mission will be pursued. Tactics are simply what happens day to day.
With what we’re building is a long-term mission with lots of potential landmines and roadblocks setup. We have to be extremely patient on the 30-year goal and move with a strong sense of urgency around those roadblocks. Honestly, I believe the success of KnowCap depends on balancing these two to perfection.
How do you do this?
You make sure that your priorities are followed with brutal and relentless optimizations. Whenever you have more than one features to deploy, or for us…programs to launch, there has to be a hierarchy of urgency. The key is to hold to that hierarchy "come hell or high water” is my mother used to say.
How do you know when its time to kills a project or adjust priorities?
You test everything. If you don’t have the data to show for an initiative or an idea, you should take a long and hard look about where or not it should be at the top of your execution agenda. If you don’t track the data you won’t know whether or not to optimize or end a project…and this is very very dangerous.
When you are focused on achieving your mission, you must be clear on the avenues you will pursue to achieve it. Any distractions can at best be a decelerator, at worst it will kill your company.
How are you making sure you are equally balancing patience and speed?